My guess is that the boats were dispatched to keep the platform safe, and since you don’t want to have four boats idling by an ongoing disaster, they turned on their hoses in part to look busy and in part to keep the flaming puddle of fuel from spreading toward the platform.
I should’ve looked a little bit more into it but I couldn’t find much information .Being that close to the platform, it makes sense. If you can get enough water on it, you can kill the fire. Kill all ignition sources on the rig and wait for the product to bleed off,