Two workers were killed and another remained missing after a massive fire broke out Friday morning at an offshore platform operated by Mexico’s state oil company Pemex, just at the southern tip of the Gulf of Mexico.
In posts on Twitter, Pemex said it had accounted for all other workers and said oil production had been hit hard by the fire.
Video circulating on social media shows the massive rig and its tangle of pipes engulfed in flames as nearby ships try to put out the fire with hoses.
The rig operates at the company’s Cantarell field, once one of the most productive in the world.
Earlier in the day, Pemex said six people had been injured in the fire, which it said started on the Nohoch-A platform and then spread to a compression platform.
It was not immediately clear Friday night if the victims were among the six injured.
Later on Friday, the company said oil production had been “substantially affected” due to the fire. Pemex did not provide further details on the impact on production.
“Our technicians are studying how to repair the pipelines, interconnections and other work to restore it,” the company said in a separate post on Twitter.
Chief Executive Octavio Romero referred to the impact in a video the company posted.
“We are going to continue looking for this person as our number one priority, as well as thinking about how we can revive activity in the area because Nohoch is very important,” he said.
A Pemex statement on Friday morning indicated that 321 of the 328 people working on the expanding platform had been successfully evacuated.
Over the last decade, Cantarell has seen its crude production drop significantly. But it is still responsible for around 170,000 barrels a day, according to company data.
The vast majority of Mexico’s oil production comes from nearby shallow-water fields clustered around the Bay of Campeche in the southern Gulf, where Pemex has suffered a series of industrial accidents in recent years.
