No, but after a couple decades in the oil/gas industry both onshore and offshore (mostly on) fires and explosions are just not that rare.
Fire fighting is a major part of the facilities design and training of nearly everyone there. It is the reason the hazardous area classificaion, fire and gas detection and equipment selection that I do every day is important.
We spend an immense amount of effort to prevent, limit and control fires and explosions, but reality is they are a normal part of the industry.
From my viewpoint, expecting an oil rig fire to be the result of a terrorist attact is like expecting every highway accident involving 3 or more vehicles to be an attack.
As a layman outside the industry, I don’t disagree with your description of what the climate is on rigs. I have no basis to, and your comments don’t particularly run against my perception anyway. I think you make a lot of sense trying to urge folks to be careful about making comments about terrorism.
You’re still going to have to understand that it was very against the grain for Obama to say he was going to relax drilling in the GOM, and then within a short period of time we had the worse oil spill in the GOM on record.
Obama has made it perfectly clear he wishes to capitalize on the current “fear” climate, and this all looks very convenient for him.
A leftist says I’m going to relax drilling. Then the worst oil spill on record takes place, and he’s pleased as punch to take advantage of it. He tries to put a moratorium on drilling because it’s just too deep down there, then extends $2 billion in loan guarantees to PetroBras for drilling in waters three times as deep.
This is bound to cause some folks to scratch their heads.