April 13, 2021
A former senior engineer on board a Transocean drillship in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico has filed a civil lawsuit alleging the offshore drilling contractor and its business partners put profits and production over safety by failing to disconnect from a deepwater well in time as a hurricane was bearing down on them last October.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Christopher Pleasant, was the Sr. Subsea Supervisor on the ultra-deepwater drillship Deepwater Asgard in the Green Canyon area of the GOM at the time of the late October 2020 hurricane. He brought the case under the Jones Act and general maritime law and is represented by offshore injury attorneys at Arnold & Itkin, LLP. Pleasant also happens to be a survivor of the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. More lawsuits from additional employees on board the rig at the time have since piled on.
Colorado university sees busy Atlantic hurricane season
Forecasters at Colorado State University in an April 9 report are predicting this year’s Atlantic hurricane season will be busier than ever, posing a potential threat to oil and gas operators along the US Gulf Coast.
“We anticipate that the 2021 Atlantic basin hurricane season will have above-normal activity,” the report from the university’s tropical meteorology project predicts.
The probability that at least one storm stronger than a category 3 hurricane, the low-point for classification as a major hurricane, will make landfall in the continental United States is 69%, above the 52% average for the last century.
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Offshore oil platform worker death off Louisiana could have been prevented, federal agency finds
Kristen Mosbrucker
Nearly two years after the death of a contractor working on an offshore oil and gas platform, a federal agency determined the incident could have been prevented if the company adhered to safety guidelines and replaced rusty flooring as preventive maintenance.
A 54-year-old production operator working the night shift for Wood Group in May 2019 went missing after the victim presumably fell through a severely corroded and deteriorating grate 45 feet above the water s surface, the agency said. The worker s body was never found despite search and rescue efforts.