39 Evacuated Off Oil Platform

Thirty-nine workers were evacuated by the U.S. Coast Guard from a large oil platform 10 miles off the Ventura County coast Thursday morning after concentrations of flammable natural gas and toxic hydrogen sulfide began to leak from a wellhead, triggering safety alarms, authorities said.

Fifteen workers remained on Platform Gail to contain the leaking gas with a shower of water and then plug the oil well, according to the Coast Guard.

No workers were injured, and the platform was declared safe for workers to return by 2 p.m., about four hours after the incident began.

The water shower to control the leak flushed oily water into the ocean, and a light petroleum sheen was being cleaned up by vessels from the Clean Seas response team.

The federal Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore platform operations in U.S. waters, began an investigation to determine how the gas was released.

“We’re not taking this situation lightly; it goes beyond a scare,” said service spokesman John Romero. “We need to find out what happened out there.... Hydrogen sulfide is a poisonous, very lethal gas.”

But officials at Venoco Inc., the platform operator, said levels of leaking gas prompted only a precautionary evacuation and were not an immediate safety threat.

“[Hydrogen sulfide] never reached levels that were immediately dangerous to our workers,” said Mike Edwards, a vice president at Venoco, a Carpinteria energy firm.

Edwards said platform detectors showed concentrations of hydrogen sulfide reached 20 parts per million. Alert levels, set by federal regulation, are 10 parts per million.

“There was also a concentration of natural gas that could combust,” he said. “That was our primary concern.”

Hydrogen sulfide is a component of natural gas, and both were leaking from one of 21 oil and gas wells on Platform Gail. The wells pump about 4,500 barrels of oil and 10 million cubic feet of natural gas every 24 hours.

Edwards said an investigation would determine what caused the gas leak.

“I think what this should indicate is that there are a lot of safety procedures on a production platform, and they worked,” he said.

Although the danger passed quickly, critics of a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal on nearby Platform Grace, also owned by Venoco, said Thursday’s gas leak showed the potential for disaster if state and federal authorities allow a terminal to be built on Grace as proposed by Crystal Energy, a Texas firm.

Bob Hattoy, spokesman for Malibu-based environmental group Citizens Against Crystal Energy, said the Platform Gail leak was “an omen of what’s to come if Platform Grace is approved for LNG and oil drilling.”

Lisa Palmer, spokeswoman for Crystal Energy, said the company would only process natural gas on Grace and would not pump oil.

“We do not have a concurrent oil and gas proposal; this would be a single-use operation,” she said.

The plan is to ship natural gas as a liquid to the platform, then vaporize it for shipment through existing natural gas lines to Southland customers.

Edwards said he saw no connection between Thursday’s oil production incident and operation of a liquefied natural gas terminal.

Lt. Bryan Clampitt, commanding officer of the Coast Guard station at Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, said Thursday’s incident turned out to be an elaborate training exercise, with five Coast Guard vessels and several local emergency crews responding.

“There were no reports of injuries or illnesses, except a few people on the life rafts were seasick,” he said. At the start of the incident, more than three dozen workers escaped the platform on life rafts, from which the Coast Guard rescued them.

The platform was cordoned off by a mile-radius safety zone.

On the platform, seawater was pumped into the well by a fire control system to control the gas, and overflowed into the ocean.

Romero, of the Minerals Management Service, said the incident was the most serious of its kind in recent years.

“I’ve been here since 1991, and we’ve never had an incident like this,” he said. “This is extremely rare.”