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Officials are saying that an explosion on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana has the potential to be a major spill.
The Coast Guard is still searching for the 11 workers missing since the blast on Tuesday. Survivors who escaped the blast have told company officials that they fear those missing were unable to evacuate.
The company has been unable to confirm those reports.
The platform burned for more than a day after a massive explosion. It sank into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday.
Crews have been searching by air and water for the 11 workers from the Deepwater Horizon, though one relative said family members have been told it's unlikely anyone survived.
The rig is owned by Transocean, which is under contract to oil giant BP. It was doing exploratory drilling about 80 km off the coast of Louisiana.
Rescue crews have covered the 5025-square-kilometre search area by air 12 times and by boat five times. The boats searched all night, hoping the missing workers might have been able to get to a covered lifeboat with supplies.
Carolyn Kemp said on Thursday that her grandson, Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, was among the missing. She said he would have been on the drilling platform when it exploded.
"They're assuming all those men who were on the platform are dead," Kemp said. "That's the last we've heard."
Other relatives waited anxiously for hourly updates. Family members of one missing worker, Shane Roshto, filed a lawsuit in New Orleans on Thursday accusing the rig's owner of negligence. The suit said he was thrown overboard by the explosion and is feared dead, though it did not indicate how family members knew that was what happened to him.
The suit names Transocean Ltd and BP. A Transocean spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment and BP wouldn't discuss the suit.
Transocean Ltd spokesman Guy Cantwell said 111 workers who made it off the Deepwater Horizon safely after Tuesday night's blast were ashore Thursday, and four others were still on a boat that operates an underwater robot. A robot will eventually be used to stop the flow of oil or gas to the rig, cutting off the fire. He said officials have not decided when that will happen.
Seventeen others hurt in the blast had been brought to shore Wednesday with burns, broken legs and smoke inhalation. Four were critically injured.
A slow trek across the water brought most of the uninjured survivors to Port Fourchon, where they were checked by doctors before being brought to a hotel in suburban New Orleans to reunite with their relatives early on Thursday.
One worker said he was awakened by alarms and scrambled to get on a life boat.
"I've been working offshore 25 years and I've never seen anything like this before," said the man, who like others at the hotel declined to give his name.
The rig is 120 by 75 metres, roughly twice the size of a football field, according to Transocean's website. A column of boiling black smoke rose hundreds of feet over the Gulf of Mexico. Officials said environmental damage appeared minimal so far.
Adrian Rose, vice president of Transocean, said the explosion appeared to be a blowout, in which natural gas or oil forces its way up a well pipe and smashes the equipment. But precisely what went wrong was under investigation.
A total of 126 workers were aboard. Seventy-nine were Transocean workers, six were BP employees and 41 were contracted.
The blast could be one of the United States' deadliest offshore drilling accidents of the past half-century.
One of the deadliest was in 1964, when a catamaran-type drilling barge operated by Pan American Petroleum Corp. near Eugene Island, about 130km off Louisiana, suffered a blowout and explosion while drilling a well. Twenty-one crew members died. The deadliest offshore drilling explosion was in 1988 about 200km off Aberdeen, Scotland, in which 167 men were killed.
Rose said the Deepwater Horizon crew had drilled the well to its final depth, more than 5,500 metres, and was cementing the steel casing at the time of the explosion.
"They did not have a lot of time to evacuate. This would have happened very rapidly," he said.
According to Transocean's website, the rig was built in 2001 in South Korea and is designed to operate in water up to 2400 metres deep, drill (about 9km down, and accommodate a crew of 130. It floats on pontoons and is moored to the sea floor by several large anchors.
Workers typically spend two weeks on the rig at a time, followed by two weeks off. Working on offshore oil rigs is a dangerous job but has become safer in recent years thanks to improved training, safety systems and maintenance, said Joe Hurt, regional vice president for the International Association of Drilling Contractors.
Since 2001, there have been 69 offshore deaths, 1349 injuries and 858 fires and explosions in the Gulf, according to the federal Minerals Management Service.