2 Workers Were Killed After a Fire Erupted on a Pemex Oil Platform

• Two workers were killed after a fire broke out on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Others were injured, with one worker suffering burns to more than a third of his body. 
• Pemex said its top priority was the search for a missing worker.

Two workers were killed and one remains missing after a fire broke out on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

Several were injured when the blaze erupted on Friday at the Nohoch Alfa platform, according to a Pemex press release.

One of the injured people suffered burns to more than a third of his body and was transferred to a hospital in Mexico City for further treatment, per the statement. 

Pemex’s CEO, Octavio Romero Oropeza, said firefighting ships were able to prevent the blaze from spreading to other platforms in the Cantarell field.

He visited the offshore oil field to check on workers and supervise efforts to control the fire, the company tweeted Saturday.   

Pemex said it’s still investigating the cause of the fire and its top priority was searching for the missing worker. 

The company estimated that it had lost more than a third of its daily output, or 700,000 barrels of crude oil, as a result of the fire. But it added that it had already recovered output to 600,000 barrels.

Another fire linked to a Pemex offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico killed five people in August 2021, BBC News reported.

“The oil industry is a risky industry. We have had accidents, which in numbers are less than in previous years,” the company’s CEO said at a news conference at the time, per the BBC.

Six weeks prior to that blaze, a gas leak in an underwater pipeline caused a fire on the ocean’s suface that took some five hours to put out, per Reuters. The company reported no injuries from the incident, which was dubbed the “eye of fire.”

Pemex did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.