2 Rescued From Water After Fire Breaks Out on Offshore Oil Rig

Two oil workers were rescued by helicopter from waters off Huntington Beach on Wednesday morning after a fire erupted on an offshore oil platform, spilling crude oil that spread for an estimated 900 yards.

The two members of the night crew escaped without injury from a Unocal Corp. platform 1.5 miles off Bolsa Chica State Park Beach. Unocal spokesman Art Bentley said it wasn’t known if the workers leaped from the 70-foot-high platform, called Eva, or ran down the stairs to a loading dock and jumped from there. The two men, whose names were not released, were the only people on the platform at the time.

The fire started at 6 a.m. when vapors in the drainage system ignited, Bentley said. The drainage system collects the runoff of oil and water from the production deck and holds it in a tank on a deck below, he said. Those flames ignited an oily film on the deck, he said.

A Shell Oil Co. helicopter crew plucked the men from the water within 50 minutes.

The fire activated a sprinkler system which also washed oil residue and overflow from the oil collection tanks into the water.

A short time later, a Unocal boat transporting the day crew arrived and extinguished the fire within an hour, officials said.

Clean Coastal Waters, a private company hired by Unocal, sent three boats to the site, contained the slick with a boom and removed the oil from the water, Charles Embleton, a Coast Guard spokesman, said.

The spill created a “light sheen,” Embleton said, but “cleanup operations are going smoothly and quickly. (Ocean) conditions are optimal.”

The platform, which produces 1,800 barrels of oil a day, was shut down Wednesday but scheduled to open Thursday.

“We have engineers out there to determine if there was (any structural damage) and to determine what caused the fire to break out,” Bentley said.

A spokesman for the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board said the environmental impact of the spill was “insignificant.”