The world's largest offshore oil rig, crippled after a series of explosions, sand into the Atlantic Ocean, yesterday, sparking fears of a massive oil spill.
The rig took more than 1.5 million litres of oil with it following three unexplained explosions last Thursday. The explosions, in one of the piles which support it on the seabed, caused two confirmed deaths, with eight other people missing.
The 210-meter-high Italian-made platform sits in 1,368 metres of water 150 km from Brazil's coast.
Dutch environmental experts, US consultants and workers from Petrobras, the state-owned petrol company, had been attempting to refloat the rig and prevent it from causing a major ecological disaster. Experts pumped nitrogen into the rig's flooded floaters, expelling 4,100 tonnes of water and reducing the massive P-36 platform's list from 30 degrees to 24 degrees.
However the rig began to list again in bad weather overnight and reached a critical 31 degrees in the early hours of yesterday, Petrobras said.
Petrobras experts and other volunteers were yesterday desperately attempting to prevent a major oil spill into the Atlantic. The company said in a statement, however, that there was "no danger" that an oil slick could reach the coastline, 150 km away. A flotilla of 26 vessels and a semi-submersible platform had already been deployed to form a barrier around the oil rig before it sank. The rig, installed at a cost of more than $400 million dollars, has been in operation since May 2000, producing 84,000 barrels of crude oil and 1.3 million cubic metres of natural gas per day, according to Petrobras officials.
The 33,000-tonne platform, the world's biggest, sits on the Roncador oil field in the Campos basin, which contains an estimated two billion barrels of crude. The field accounts for 60 per cent of Brazilian crude oil production.
Divers looking for the missing eight people called off the search when the rig sank, Petrobras said.
The company has been plagued by a series of recent spills and accidents, which have tarnished its reputation.
Petrobras shares fell sharply following the news that the P-36 oil rig had sunk.
Passengers arriving in Brazil from Europe are getting the pink-carpet treatment thanks to the foot-and-mouth disease.
The disease, which has devastated livestock in Britain and France, has prompted Brazilian officials to greet transatlantic passengers with a sterilisation procedure aimed at halting the spread of the highly contagious virus that causes foot-and-mouth.
On Monday evening at the Tom Jobim International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's agriculture minister, Mr Marcus Pratini de Moraes, rolled out a squishy pink foam carpet in the customs area. All passengers from Europe will have to walk on the carpet containing iodine to kill any harmful micro organisms. Brazilian customs agents are also giving the pink-carpet treatment to passengers from Argentina, which last week reported a foot-and-mouth outbreak. --(Reuters)