Oil is spewing from a damaged well north of a bay where officials have been fighting the spill from the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Although information is still highly preliminary, in the conference call just ended, Admiral Thad Allen, Incident Commander for Deepwater Horizon Response, said that the Coast Guard reported a collision with an oil and natural gas rig. The spew, reported to be as high as 100 feet by the Coast Guard, is just off the southeast of the Louisiana coast in Barataria Bay Waterway.
Apparently, it was a tow boat that collided with the oil and natural gas platform and, said the admiral, "there is a light sheen around the platform now and there is some vapor emanating. Pictures show a combination of gas and water vapor coming to the surface. Six thousand feet of boom are around that." He said this is a state-owned well.
The boat that hit the well, Pere Ana C, was pushing a dredge barge at the time. According to the US Coast Guard, this occurred at approximately 1:00 a.m. today.
A helicopter is circling and Gov. Bobby Jindal, R, La., is onboard. "We'll provide details as they come," Allen said, before stating that ironically one of the pluses to the current recovery effort is having sufficient vessels and manpower in place such as around Barataria Bay (LA) to deal with tangential accidents such as these that may erupt.
For more information visit: http://www.uscgnews.com/go/doc/786/440291/
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