That's an oil rig?
yes with most of the upper section missing
yes with most of the upper section missing
Or at least, it WAS an oil rig. BTW, thanks for this thread. Seems to me that, give the potential destruction that could have occurred, we "dodged a bullet" this time. Perhaps all the prayers were answered...
An *offshore* oil rig, yes -- the kind that drills for sub-sea oil out in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a floating platform with drilling equipment, which anchors in a likely spot and then runs a pipe with a drill bit down to the sea floor and then starts drilling.
This one broke loose and got blown back to shore.
It wasn't at sea. It was in being worked on.
They call it a Flotell...... it houses 450 workers aqnd is tied up to an oil platform when in service.
Yeah, a big "semi" .....semisubmersible barge, it's really floating on a catamaran-like pair of pontoons that stay submerged but support the big platform above it. This kind of arrangement evolved from a submersible barge, which was similar but much smaller and designed to sit on the bottom. Submersibles could work in up to about 50' of water, tops, whereas big semis, depending on their anchoring systems and dynamic positioning systems (propellers all over the pontoons, run by computers), can operate in up to 5,000' of water, or somewhere near it. You can probably find a good description of them on the website RigZone.com, an oil-industry site. They're classified by "generation", as they've evolved like computer chips, in spurts, and the "generation" generally corresponds to the water-depth capability (newer = deeper).
So there's a big "hull" (pontoons) that you don't see underwater, underneath the rig. The naval architect who posted up is right, that situation is a real mess, and someone's ass is going to hang higher than Haemon for not securing that rig better. You're probably looking at up to $400,000,000 worth of mobile drilling equipment there, capable of earning $250,000/day if it were working -- which was obviously what it was being prepped for in the yard, before all hell broke loose.
They may be able to jet around the pontoons, if the Corps of Engineers and EPA will let them, to try to refloat the rig (which will have been driven into shallower waters atop a storm tide). That'd be a ton of dredging, but cheaper than cutting the rig to pieces and reassembling it later. Ouch!
It's actually a "Floatel" a Sea-borne Hotel for Oil Workers.
I heard it was not an oil rig but the crew station for the rig. I don't know if that is accurate since it came from Sheppard Smith.