A fire broke out Friday morning on an oil platform off Louisiana’s coast, forcing the evacuation of 28 workers, the U.S. Coast Guard tells The Associated Press. No injuries were reported.
Workers were evacuated by an offshore supply vessel that reported the fire at 2:50 a.m. today in state waters near Breton Island off Louisiana’s southeastern coast, the Coast Guard says.
Texas Petroleum Investment Co., the platform’s owner and operator, estimated no more than 120 barrels of crude oil—about 5,040 gallons—were stored on the platform. Coast Guard officials had earlier worried that storage tanks on the platform were filled to their capacity of 168,000 gallons.
Production on the platform was shut down. The Coast Guard says a light sheen of oil could be seen along a more than one-mile stretch of water.
Petty Officer Ryan Tippets says a firefighting vessel was on scene and another was en route this morning.
“The production platform where the fire occurred gathers oil and then pumps it through a pipeline so there is little oil stored on site, and all wells feeding the platform have been shut down,” David Marguiles, spokesman for Texas Petroleum Investment, says in an email to The AP, adding a compressor on the platform is believed to have caught fire.
The platform is used to gather some 90,000 gallons of oil a day from a field of 50 to 60 wells, Marguiles says. While it has a capacity of 168,000 barrels, far less was being stored at the time of the fire, he says.
