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Tag: Industrial accidents

  • Chinese steel factory officials detained after explosion that leaves 4 dead, 6 missing

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    Chinese police have detained those in charge of a steel factory in Inner Mongolia after an explosion killed four people

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  • Crews carefully start removing first piece of twisted steel from collapsed Baltimore bridge

    Crews carefully start removing first piece of twisted steel from collapsed Baltimore bridge

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    BALTIMORE — Teams of engineers worked Saturday on the intricate process of cutting and lifting the first section of twisted steel from the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, which crumpled into the Patapsco River this week after a massive cargo ship crashed into one of its supports.

    Sparks could be seen flying from a section of bent and crumpled steel in the afternoon, and video released by officials in the evening showed demolition crews using a cutting torch to slice through the thick beams. The joint incident command said in a statement that the work was being done on the top of the north side of the collapsed structure.

    Crews were carefully measuring and cutting the steel from the broken bridge before attaching straps so it can be lifted onto a barge and floated away, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath said.

    Seven floating cranes — including a massive one capable of lifting 1,000 tons — 10 tugboats, nine barges, eight salvage vessels and five Coast Guard boats were on site in the water southeast of Baltimore.

    Each movement affects what happens next and ultimately how long it will take to remove all the debris and reopen the ship channel and the blocked Port of Baltimore, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said.

    “I cannot stress enough how important today and the first movement of this bridge and of the wreckage is. This is going to be a remarkably complicated process,” Moore said.

    Undeterred by the chilly morning weather, longtime Baltimore resident Randy Lichtenberg and others took cellphone photos or just quietly looked at the broken pieces of the bridge, which including its steel trusses weigh as much as 4,000 tons.

    “I wouldn’t want to be in that water. It’s got to be cold. It’s a tough job,” Lichtenberg said from a spot on the river called Sparrows Point.

    The shock of waking up Tuesday morning to video of what he called an iconic part of the Baltimore skyline falling into the water has given way to sadness.

    “It never hits you that quickly. It’s just unbelievable,” Lichtenberg said.

    One of the first goals for crews on the water is to get a smaller auxiliary ship channel open so tugboats and other small barges can move freely. Crews also want to stabilize the site so divers can resume searching for four missing workers who are presumed dead.

    Two other workers were rescued from the water in the hours following the bridge collapse, and the bodies of two more were recovered from a pickup truck that fell and was submerged in the river. They had been filling potholes on the bridge and while police were able to stop vehicle traffic after the ship called in a mayday, they could not get to the construction workers, who were from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

    The crew of the cargo ship Dali, which is managed by Synergy Marine Group, remained on board with the debris from the bridge around it, and were safe and were being interviewed. They are keeping the ship running as they will be needed to get it out of the channel once more debris has been removed.

    The vessel is owned by Grace Ocean Private Ltd. and was chartered by Danish shipping giant Maersk.

    The collision and collapse appeared to be an accident that came after the ship lost power. Federal and state investigators are still trying to determine why.

    Assuaging concern about possible pollution from the crash, Adam Ortiz, the Environmental Protection Agency’s mid-Atlantic Regional Administrator, said there was no indication in the water of active releases from the ship or materials hazardous to human health.

    Officials are also trying to figure out how to handle the economic impact of a closed port and the severing of a major highway link. The bridge was completed in 1977 and carried Interstate 695 around southeast Baltimore.

    Maryland transportation officials are planning to rebuild the bridge, promising to consider innovative designs or building materials to hopefully shorten a project that could take years.

    President Joe Biden’s administration has approved $60 million in immediate aid and promised the federal government will pay the full cost to rebuild.

    Ship traffic at the Port of Baltimore remains suspended, but the Maryland Port Administration said trucks were still being processed at marine terminals.

    The loss of a road that carried 30,000 vehicles a day and the port disruption will affect not only thousands of dockworkers and commuters, but also U.S. consumers, who are likely to feel the impact of shipping delays. The port handles more cars and more farm equipment than any other U.S. facility.

    ___

    Collins reported from Columbia, South Carolina. Associated Press writers Sarah Brumfield in Washington, D.C.; Kristin M. Hall in Nashville, Tennessee; Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee; and Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington, contributed.

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  • Tata announces plans to cut 2,800 steel jobs in a blow to Welsh town

    Tata announces plans to cut 2,800 steel jobs in a blow to Welsh town

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    LONDON — Indian firm Tata Steel announced Friday it will close both blast furnaces at its plant in Port Talbot, Wales, eliminating 2,800 jobs, as part of plans to make its unprofitable U.K. operation leaner and greener.

    Tata plans to switch from coal-fired blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces, which emit less carbon — and need fewer workers — using a half-billion pound ($634 million) investment from the British government.

    The company said it would “commence statutory consultation as part of its plan to transform and restructure its U.K. business.”

    “This plan is intended to reverse more than a decade of losses and transition from the legacy blast furnaces to a more sustainable, green steel business,” it said.

    The company said it expects about 2,800 jobs will be eliminated, most in the next 18 months, with a further 300 at longer-term risk.

    The news is a major blow to Port Talbot, a town of about 35,000 people whose economy has been built on the steel industry since the early 1900s.

    Unions have called for one blast furnace to remain open while the electric one is built, which would have meant fewer job cuts. They say Tata rejected their proposal.

    The Unite union said it would “use everything in its armory” to fight job losses, including potential strikes.

    At its height in the 1960s, the Port Talbot steelworks employed around 20,000 people, before cheaper offerings from China and other countries hit production. More than 300,000 people worked in Britain’s steel industry in 1971; by 2021 it was about 26,000.

    The steel industry now accounts for 0.1 percent of the British economy and 2.4% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to research by the House of Commons Library.

    Tata warned in 2022 that its U.K. operations were under threat unless it secured government funding to help it move to less carbon-intensive electric arc furnaces.

    Last year the U.K. government gave Tata up to 500 million pounds ($634 million) to make the Port Talbot steelworks greener.

    The British government said the investment would “secure a sustainable and competitive future for the U.K. steel sector.” Moving to electric furnaces would “transform the site and protect thousands of jobs, both in Port Talbot and throughout the supply chain,” it said.

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  • Furnace explosion at Chinese-owned nickel plant in Indonesia kills at least 13 and injures 46 others

    Furnace explosion at Chinese-owned nickel plant in Indonesia kills at least 13 and injures 46 others

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    PALU, Indonesia — A smelting furnace exploded Sunday at a Chinese-owned nickel plant on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, killing at least 13 workers and injuring dozens of others, police and a company official said.

    It was the latest in a series of deadly incidents at nickel smelting plants in Indonesia that are part of China‘s ambitious transnational development program known as the Belt and Road Initiative.

    Nickel is a key component in global battery production for electric vehicles.

    At least four Chinese and nine Indonesian workers died when the furnace exploded while they were repairing it, said Central Sulawesi police chief Agus Nugroho.

    The blast was so powerful it demolished the furnace and damaged parts of the side walls of the building, said Nugroho, adding that about 46 workers were injured, including 14 Chinese nationals, some in critical condition.

    Authorities are working to determine whether negligence by the company led to the deaths, Nugroho said.

    The accident occurred at PT Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel, a subsidiary of PT Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, known as PT IMIP, in the Bahodopi neighborhood of Morowali regency.

    “We sincerely apologize for this incident and we are working closely with authorities to investigate what caused the accident,” said company spokesperson Deddy Kurniawan.

    Rescuers extinguished the fire and evacuated workers after a nearly four-hour operation, he added.

    In a statement released Sunday afternoon by the company, Kurniawan said the furnace was under maintenance and not operating at the time. However, “residual slag in the furnace” came in contact “with flammable items” driving the furnace walls to collapse and the remaining steel slag to flow out.

    Previously, the company said explosive liquids at the bottom of the furnace triggered a fire and a subsequent explosion in nearby oxygen cylinders.

    It was the third deadly incident this year at Chinese-owned nickel smelting plants in Central Sulawesi province, which has the largest nickel reserves in Indonesia.

    Two dump truck operators were killed when they were engulfed by a wall of black sludge-like material following the collapse of a nickel waste disposal site in April.

    In January, two workers, including a Chinese national, were killed in riots that involved workers and security guards at an Indonesia-China joint venture in North Morowali regency.

    Last year, a loader truck ran over and killed a Chinese worker while he was repairing a road in PT IMIP’s mining area, and an Indonesian man burned to death when a furnace in the company’s factory exploded.

    Nearly 50% of PT IMIP’s shares are owned by a Chinese holding company, and the rest are owned by two Indonesian companies. It began smelter operations in 2013 and is now the largest nickel-based industrial area in Indonesia.

    Three Chinese workers in March filed a complaint to Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights, alleging that their health is deteriorating due to dust and smoke exposure while working seven-day weeks without a break at PT IMIP. They added that workers there don’t have adequate safety equipment.

    Data collected by the Mining Advocacy Network, an Indonesian watchdog, showed that at least 22 workers from China and Indonesia have died in nickel smelting plants in Central Sulawesi province since 2019, including two Chinese nationals who committed suicide.

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  • Offshore wind projects face economic storm. Cancellations jeopardize Biden clean energy goals

    Offshore wind projects face economic storm. Cancellations jeopardize Biden clean energy goals

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    WASHINGTON — The cancellation of two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey is the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, jeopardizing the Biden administration’s goals of powering 10 million homes from towering ocean-based turbines by 2030 and establishing a carbon-free electric grid five years later.

    The Danish wind energy developer Ørsted said this week it’s scrapping its Ocean Wind I and II projects off southern New Jersey due to problems with supply chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the amount of tax credits the company wanted. Together, the projects were supposed to deliver over 2.2 gigawatts of power.

    The news comes after developers in New England canceled power contacts for three projects that would have provided another 3.2 gigawatts of wind power to Massachusetts and Connecticut. They said their projects were no longer financially feasible.

    In total, the cancellations equate to nearly one-fifth of President Joe Biden’s goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030.

    Despite the setbacks, offshore wind continues to move forward, the White House said, citing recent investments by New York state and approval by the Interior Department of the nation’s largest planned offshore wind farm in Virginia. Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management also announced new offshore wind lease areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

    “While macroeconomic headwinds are creating challenges for some projects, momentum remains on the side of an expanding U.S. offshore wind industry — creating good-paying union jobs in manufacturing, shipbuilding and construction,″ while strengthening the power grid and providing new clean energy resources for American families and businesses, the White House said in a statement Thursday.

    Industry experts now say that while the U.S. likely won’t hit 30 gigawatts by 2030, a significant amount of offshore wind power is still attainable by then, roughly 20 to 22 gigawatts or more. That’s far more than the nation has today, with just two small demonstration projects that provide a small fraction of a single gigawatt of power.

    Large, ocean-based wind farms are the linchpin of government plans to shift to renewable energy, particularly in populous East Coast states with limited land for wind turbines or solar arrays. Eight East Coast states have offshore wind mandates set by legislation or executive actions that commit them to adding a combined capacity of more than 45 gigawatts, according to ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm.

    “I think very few people would argue that the U.S. will have the gigawatts the Biden administration wants″ by 2030, said Timothy Fox, a ClearView vice president. “But I do think eventually we will have it and will likely exceed it.”

    Offshore wind developers have publicly lamented the global economic gales they’re facing. Molly Morris, president of U.S. offshore wind for the Norwegian company Equinor, said the industry is facing a “perfect storm.”

    High inflation, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost of capital and building materials are making projects more expensive while developers are trying to get the first large U.S. offshore wind farms opened. Ørsted is writing off $4 billion, due largely to cancellation of the two New Jersey projects.

    David Hardy, group executive vice president and CEO Americas at Ørsted, said it’s crucial to lower the levelized cost of offshore wind in the United States so Americans aren’t debating between affordability and clean energy. Hardy spoke at the American Clean Power industry group’s offshore wind conference in Boston last month on a panel with Morris.

    “We’re probably a little bit too ambitious,” he said. “We came in hot, we came in fast, we thought we could build projects that were inexpensive, large projects right out of the gate. And it turns out that we probably still need to go through the same learning curve that Europe did, with higher prices in the beginning and a little slower pace.”

    In May, there were 27 U.S. offshore wind projects that had negotiated agreements with states to provide power before the brunt of the cost increases hit, according to Walt Musial, offshore wind chief engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an arm of the Energy Department. The delay between signing purchase agreements and getting final approval to build allowed unexpected cost increases to render many projects economically unfeasible, he said.

    Musial called Ørsted’s announcement a setback for the industry but “not a fatal blow by any means.”

    On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced approval of the nation’s largest offshore wind project. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project will be a 2.6 gigawatt wind farm off of Virginia Beach to power 900,000 homes. And even as Ørsted announced the New Jersey cancellations, it said it was investing with utility Eversource to move forward with construction of Revolution Wind, Rhode Island and Connecticut’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm, a 704-megawatt project.

    The current outlook from S&P Global Commodity Insights is 22 gigawatts by 2030, though that will be revised due to the recent industry announcements.

    New York state, meanwhile, recently announced the award of 4 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity as it seeks to obtain 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. That announcement came shortly after New York regulators rejected a request for bigger payments for four offshore wind projects worth a combined 4.2 gigawatts of power. Those developers said they were assessing the viability of their projects.

    Any delay in offshore wind means continued reliance on fossil fuel-burning power plants, according to environmental advocates.

    “The quicker they come online, the quicker our air quality improves,” said Conor Bambrick, director of policy for Environmental Advocates NY.

    New Jersey, under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, has established increasingly stringent clean energy goals, moving from 100% clean energy by 2050 to 100% by 2035. Murphy cast Ørsted’s decision as “outrageous” and an abandonment of its commitments, but the two-term Democrat said New Jersey plans to move forward with offshore wind. Additional offshore projects are pending before the state’s utility regulators.

    “We definitely remain optimistic,” said Catherine Klinger, Murphy’s climate action and green economy executive director. “Offshore wind is a lot bigger than Ørsted.”

    The first U.S. commercial-scale offshore wind farms are currently under construction: Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts and South Fork Wind off Rhode Island and New York.

    Catherine Bowes, a senior director at Turn Forward, a nonprofit that advocates for offshore wind, believes the industry still has strong momentum because of the quality of the wind resources off the coastlines and the growing demand for clean electricity to meet decarbonization goals. The nonprofit is advocating for 100 gigawatts of U.S. offshore wind power.

    “The bumpiness we’re seeing right now in no way indicates an inability of offshore wind to play a major role in the U.S. electric grid,″ Bowes said Thursday.

    Terminated contracts can be rebid, presumably with higher prices to cover development costs. Offshore wind developers are asking the federal government to ensure the industry can take advantage of tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act to help these first projects become operational.

    Michael Brown, CEO of Ocean Winds North America, which is developing several offshore projects, including one in New Jersey, said at the clean power conference that the industry will thrive in the U.S. but “it might be a little bit slower than we all want it.”

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    McDermott reported from Providence, Rhode Island; Hill from Albany, New York and Catalini from Trenton, New Jersey.

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    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Explosion off Nigeria points to threat posed by aging oil ships around the world

    Explosion off Nigeria points to threat posed by aging oil ships around the world

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    OKITIPUPA, Nigeria — It was the dead of night when the ship caught fire, Patrick Aganyebi remembers, but the flames made it seem as bright as day.

    The explosion that night woke him and knocked him to the floor. He tucked his phone and his ID card in his pockets, strapped on a life jacket and made his way to the upper deck. As the flames barreled toward him, he prepared to jump nearly 100 feet (30 meters) into the sea.

    Five workers were killed and two others presumed dead in the blast on the Trinity Spirit, a rusting converted oil tanker anchored 15 miles (24 km) off the coast of Nigeria that pulled crude oil from the ocean floor. It was by the grace of God, Aganyebi said, that he and two fellow crewmen escaped, rescued by a pair of fishermen as the burning vessel sank along with 40,000 barrels of oil.

    The Trinity Spirit’s explosion in February of last year stands among the deadliest tragedies on an oil ship or platform in recent years. The Associated Press’ review of court documents, ship databases, and interviews with crew members reveals that the 46-year-old ship was in a state of near-total disrepair, and the systems meant to ensure its safe and lawful operation — annual inspections, a flag registry, insurance — had gradually fallen away.

    The Trinity Spirit fits a pattern of old tankers put to work storing and extracting oil even while on the brink of mechanical breakdowns. At least eight have been shut down after a fire, a major safety hazard, or the death of a worker in the last decade, according to an AP review. More than 30 are older than the Trinity Spirit and still storing oil around the world.

    Jan-Erik Vinnem, who has spent his career studying the risks of offshore oil production, said he’s sometimes shocked when he sees pictures of oil ships in Africa.

    “I call them ‘floating bombs,’” he said.

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    This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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    AGING HULLS

    The Trinity Spirit was part of a class of vessels that extracts oil offshore and stores it at sea. They are known as floating production storage and offloading units — FPSOs — or as FSOs, floating storage and offloading units, when used only for storage. Since the 1970s, they’ve become increasingly popular for developing oil in deep waters and in places where no pipelines exist. According to the environmental group SkyTruth, there are some 240 in operation today.

    FPSOs are unlike most ships for one key reason: They stay in place. Once attached to the ocean floor, they can linger at the same oil field for years or even decades. They may be surveyed by in-country regulators or hired inspectors, but they operate outside the normal flow of shipping traffic and the added safety and legal inspections that take place in port.

    “If a vessel is sitting in a country’s domestic waters and is not going around trading … then you’re not going to have that same level of oversight,” said Meghan Mathieson, strategy director at the Canadian-based Clear Seas Centre for Responsible Marine Shipping.

    More than half the current fleet of FPSOs are recycled oil tankers, according to Oslo-based Rystad Energy, which keeps data on the ships. Senior analyst Edvard Christoffersen said that without a major repair, most oil ships have hulls built to last about 25 years. But some FPSOs are used far longer, sometimes to dangerous effect.

    In the same month that the Trinity Spirit caught fire, inspectors found problems with an aging FPSO moored off the coast of Malaysia. The Bunga Kertas was built as an oil tanker in the 1980s, and press coverage of its conversion to an FPSO in 2004 said the vessel had an intended service life of 10 more years.

    But it was 18 years later when a safety issue on the Bunga Kertas led to a pause in operations. The ship’s hull had “ integrity issues,” according to stakeholder Jadestone Energy. Four months later a diver was killed while repairing the damage. Petronas, the operator at the time, did not respond to a request for comment.

    Until this fall, another aging ship floating off the coast of Yemen seemed dangerously close to spilling a massive amount of oil. The FSO Safer was built in the same year as the Trinity Spirit, and became a floating hazard over years of neglect amid the country’s civil war. Seawater had leaked into the ship’s engine room by 2020.

    “It could break up at any time – or explode,” the United Nations said in a statement this spring.

    The ship held more than a million barrels of oil — risking a spill that could have decimated fisheries in the Red Sea, threatened desalination plants and washed oil on the shores of countries around the Horn of Africa, according to the U.N. After years of alarm and negotiations, the oil was transferred onto another tanker this August, but the rusting Safer remains off Yemen’s coast, awaiting funds to be scrapped.

    Age isn’t the only measure of a ship’s health: Climate, storms and wave patterns can add stress to ship components or increase the pace of corrosion, just as careful maintenance can extend a ship’s life.

    But the fleet’s growing age is well known in the industry. The average hull age of FPSOs has increased from 22 to nearly 28 years since 2010, according to Rystad Energy. The American Bureau of Shipping — one of several companies known as classification societies that certify vessels’ safety — launched a working group in 2021 to address the challenges of older FPSOs, noting that 55 ships were approaching the end of their intended lives.

    “A lot of these things are foreseeable,” said Ian Ralby, a maritime security expert who helped sound the alarm about the Safer.

    “If they are not well maintained and not watched carefully,” Ralby said, “they can sink, they can spill, and they can, as the Trinity Spirit showed, blow up.”

    DANGEROUS TO ABANDON

    There has been little to no public explanation of what led to the Trinity Spirit’s explosion, though multiple Nigerian agencies had responsibility for overseeing the ship. The Trinity Spirit had been on the same oil field for more than two decades. According to Aganyebi, after the ship arrived in Nigeria, it was never brought to shore for major upgrades or repairs.

    Warning signs began years before it caught fire. In 2015, the American Bureau of Shipping canceled its classification and ceased inspections of the ship. There’s no record the Trinity Spirit had insurance after that point, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence. In the next several years, the ship lost its privilege to fly the flag of Liberia, becoming a stateless vessel.

    By 2019, Nigeria’s petroleum regulator had revoked the Trinity Spirit’s license to pump oil. Nigeria’s head of maritime safety, quoted in local press coverage, said his agency had directed the ship to stop operating five years before the blast. Yet the Trinity Spirit was never forced to leave.

    Up till the moment of the explosion, there was oil on board. As recently as 2021, according to satellite imagery and ship transponder data, oil was loaded onto a tanker that later docked at a Shell refinery in the Netherlands.

    Adeyemi Adeyiga, a spokesperson for Nigeria’s Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, which regulates the country’s oil resources, said the sale was legal because the oil was produced before the license was revoked. And a spokesperson for Shell said the company conducts robust reviews of its supply chain and complies with all laws and regulations.

    Though the federal government investigated the Trinity Spirit’s explosion, more than a year later no findings have been released. For months, it seemed the only scrutiny would fall on the surviving men.

    Not long after their escape, and still in the throes of recovery, Aganyebi and a fellow crewman were arrested on accusations of “Murder, Arson, and Malicious Damage,” according to their charging documents. Police were acting on a complaint from Shebah Exploration and Production Company Limited — the Trinity Spirit’s longtime operator.

    An attorney in Lagos took on the case pro bono.

    “They committed no offense, they did nothing wrong. They were staffers of the company,” Benson Enikuomehin said. In an interview, he accused Shebah of drumming up criminal charges to distract from the company’s missteps. Anything that took place on the Trinity Spirit should be considered illegal after the license to the oil field was revoked, he said.

    Yinka Agidee, an attorney specializing in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector who was not involved in the case, said the Trinity Spirit represented an “accident waiting to happen,” and showed that local authorities failed to enforce their own orders.

    “I’m not sure if it’s a question of people closing their eyes or deliberately not doing what they’re supposed to have done,” she said. “But that has resulted in an accident and there has been a loss of life. So we need some explanation.”

    Interviews and an exploration of documents provide a lack of clarity about who was responsible for the Trinity Spirit in the final years of its decline. Though Shebah hired Aganyebi and the rest of the Trinity Spirit’s crew, CEO Ikemefuna Okafor said in an email to the AP that the company wasn’t responsible for the ship’s neglect. The company reported the surviving crew to police, he said, because it had evidence of illegal storage of oil on the ship.

    According to Okafor, liquidators seized ownership of the Trinity Spirit in 2018 due to Shebah’s outsized debt. Yet in a deposition given one year before the explosion, the company’s former president, Ambrosie Orjiako, described how Shebah continued to run operations.

    Sustaining fuel purchases, food supplies, and “skeletal manpower” wasn’t easy, Orijako said, because “there’s no revenue coming in.” But he managed to fund the minimal operations with family resources, he said, because the FPSO “would be dangerous to abandon.”

    Adeyiga, the spokesperson for Nigeria’s Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, said it was still finalizing its investigation into the ship’s explosion and would continue working to prevent similar tragedies from happening.

    The Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but issued notice in December that all FPSOs and FSOs in Nigeria’s waters must have a flag, be certified by a classification society, and maintain official plans for ship maintenance and emergency response.

    SAVE OUR SOULS

    The deck of the Trinity Spirit was an expanse of rust. Orange rust coated the floor, crept over pipes and trailed from crevices in the walls, according to cell phone photos taken four months before the explosion. Equipment failures plagued the ship’s interior: The engine room flooded twice, Aganyebi said, and the main generator plant was damaged and never repaired.

    Shebah had started running operations on the ship in 2004, taking over from Houston-based ConocoPhillips. But the site’s wells had passed peak oil production several years earlier, according to the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. Within a few years Shebah’s venture showed signs of financial stress.

    Oil and gas operators tend to operate on the edge of financial wealth or financial ruin, said David Hammond, founder of the nonprofit Human Rights at Sea.

    “These things go from boom to bust,” he said. “The workers are the last people to be looked after.”

    Aganyebi worked in the engine room of the Trinity Spirit. Within a year of joining the crew in 2014, he said, Shebah stopped reliably paying his wages. Lawrence Yorgolo, who operated the crane on the ship, and Pius Orofin, a deck operator — the only other survivors of last year’s fire — alleged the same in interviews with the AP. The men said they stayed on board the ship because they had few other options and hoped they would someday be paid.

    The staff sent repeated letters asking for the money they were owed, the men told AP. One of their last attempts was dated July 2019, with a subject line of “SAVE OUR SOUL (SOS).” They wrote they had worked 15 months without salary and endured, with “pains and hardship,” the “harsh condition and occupational hazards” of life on board the Trinity Spirit.

    Shebah by that time owed millions of dollars. A trio of banks had sued the company over its alleged failure to make payments on a $150 million loan, and in 2016 a judge ruled that Shebah must repay nearly the full amount. A government-run entity, the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria, moved to take over the company and the assets of its president. The ship’s staffing dwindled from nearly 40 people to 10.

    For those who remained, there were times on the ship when there was nothing to eat, the survivors told AP. Yorgolo recalled how the crew went hungry one year on Christmas. On a separate occasion — the worst of them, he said — the engine room flooded and the staff worked for three days without food. The radio operator sent a message pleading with oil operators nearby to come to their aid.

    “Our management was furious,” Yorgolo said.

    When the radio operator next went to shore, according to Aganyebi, Yorgolo and Orofin, Shebah didn’t allow him back on the ship. He was the designated person to fire a flare or call for help in an emergency. Had the radio operator been on board the night of the explosion, Aganyebi said, “maybe those people that have died — they wouldn’t have died.”

    The AP’s attempts to reach the former radio operator were unsuccessful.

    When it broke in two and began to sink, the Trinity Spirit had at least 40,000 barrels of oil on board, according to Nigeria’s environmental department, which responded to examine the spill. It was capable, like most FPSOs, of storing more than a million barrels.

    The agency said oil wasn’t leaking from the submerged tanks nor had it washed up on shore, but letters still arrived from community members in nearby Ondo and Delta states complaining about the spill. Oil sheens were visible fanning out from the vessel in satellite imagery for days.

    Five bodies were recovered, and two were never found.

    SINKING SHIP

    Among the more than 30 ships identified by the AP as older than the Trinity Spirit is the Al-Zaafarana, floating off the coast of Egypt. At 54 years, it is one of the oldest FPSOs still in service. Close behind it are FPSOs in Malaysia and Brazil, each at least half a century old.

    Along Nigeria’s coast, about 200 miles (320 km) south of where the Trinity Spirit caught fire, the FPSO Mystras is still in service at 47 years old, although industry reports have noted structural issues on the ship. The classification society DNV severed ties with the Mystras three years ago, ending its regular inspections. According to Rystad Energy, it was originally designed to operate only through 2014.

    The Mystras’ owner, NNPC Limited, did not respond to AP’s requests for comment.

    Further inland, the Trinity Spirit’s surviving crew members have been left to eke out a living as they wait for the wages they say were never paid. Aganyebi’s vision is poor from the glare of the explosion; Orofin’s hearing is damaged from the noise. He has a long scar on his leg. Both men spent 19 days in jail.

    Yorgolo, who was the only survivor not charged with a crime, fell on his back when he jumped from the burning vessel and was unconscious when fishermen pulled him into their boat. He believes he wasn’t named as a suspect only because he spent months in the hospital suffering from an injured spine.

    The charges were dropped in October last year after the Ondo State Ministry of Justice reviewed the case. In conversations with AP, the men vehemently denied setting the vessel on fire or illegally storing oil. They blamed the explosion on their employer, Shebah, and the years without maintenance on the ship.

    For Aganyebi, it was clear the company had abandoned the Trinity Spirit long ago.

    “No medical personnel, no safety officer, no radio man in that gigantic vessel,” he said.

    Off the coast of Nigeria, the ship is still visible — split in two pieces and half submerged. As recently as September, in satellite imagery, oil appeared to be leaking from the site of the wreck. It’s unclear when authorities will remove the hazard or salvage the remaining oil, as slowly, the ship sinks further into the sea.

    ___

    Wieffering reported from Washington, D.C. Associated Press reporters Michael Biesecker in Washington, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut and Chinedu Asadu in Abuja, Nigeria, contributed to this report.

    ___

    Follow the reporters: @helenwieffering and @GraceEkpu

    Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

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  • Kazakhstan confirms nationalization of ArcelorMittal subsidiary after mine fire kills at least 32

    Kazakhstan confirms nationalization of ArcelorMittal subsidiary after mine fire kills at least 32

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    LONDON — Kazakhstan confirmed the nationalization of ArcelorMittal Temirtau which operates the country’s largest steel plants and several coal and ore mines following a coal mine fire that killed on Saturday, according to emergency services, at least 32 workers while another 14 remained unaccounted for.

    Some 252 people were working at the Kostenko coal mine in the Karaganda region at the time of the blaze, the site’s operating company, ArcelorMittal Temirtau, confirmed in a statement. It said the fire was believed to have been caused by a pocket of methane gas.

    The fire is the latest in a string of workplace deaths at sites operated by ArcelorMittal Temirtau. In August, four miners were killed after a fire erupted at the same mine, while five people died following a methane leak at another site in November 2022.

    The company confirmed Saturday that it was finalizing a deal with the Kazakh government to nationalize the firm amid growing discontent from officials.

    Prime Minister Alikhan Smailov said in a statement on the Kazakh president’s website the government had reached a preliminary agreement with the company’s shareholders and was now in the process of “formalizing” the nationalization.

    Speculation around the company’s future had been growing since September, when Kazakhstan’s first deputy prime minister, Roman Sklyar, told journalists that the government had started talks with potential investors to buy out ArcelorMittal after becoming increasingly unhappy with its failure to meet investment obligations and repeated worker safety violations.

    Speaking on Saturday, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced Oct. 29 as a national day of mourning in Kazakhstan. The office of the country’s Prosecutor General has also said it was starting an investigation into potential safety violations in the coal mine.

    In a statement, ArcelorMittal Temirtau said that work had been halted at all of their coal mining sites in Kazakhstan. It also conveyed “pain” at the lives lost and said its efforts “are now aimed at ensuring that affected employees receive comprehensive care and rehabilitation, as well as close cooperation with government authorities.”

    ArcelorMittal Temirtau is the local representative for Luxembourg-based multinational ArcelorMittal, the world’s second-largest steel producer.

    Besides worker safety concerns, ArcelorMittal Temirtau has also fallen under scrutiny in recent years for its environmental violations.

    The Kazakh city of Temirtau — the company’s namesake and home of its steel plant — made global headlines in 2018 after being blanketed in black snow, a phenomenon that the company attributed to a lack of wind.

    In November 2021, local residents also shared videos of the town carpeted in fine, magnetic dust.

    Following the November 2022 deaths, Tokayev said that more than 100 workers had died at ArcelorMittal sites in Kazakhstan since 2006.

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  • Inside scientists’ mission to save America’s wine industry from climate change

    Inside scientists’ mission to save America’s wine industry from climate change

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    ALPINE, Ore. — The U.S. West Coast produces over 90% of America’s wine, but the region is also prone to wildfires — a combustible combination that spelled disaster for the industry in 2020 and one that scientists are scrambling to neutralize.

    Sample a good wine and you might get notes of oak or red fruit. But sip on wine made from grapes that were penetrated by smoke, and it could taste like someone dumped the contents of an ashtray into your glass.

    Wine experts from three West Coast universities are working together to meet the threat, including developing spray coatings to protect grapes, pinpointing the elusive compounds that create that nasty ashy taste, and deploying smoke sensors to vineyards to better understand smoke behavior.

    The U.S. government is funding their research with millions of dollars. Wineries are also taking steps to protect their product and brand.

    The risk to America’s premier wine-making regions — where wildfires caused billions of dollars in losses in 2020 — is growing, with climate change deepening drought and overgrown forests becoming tinderboxes. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, grapes are the highest-value crop in the United States, with 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of grape-bearing land, 96% of it on the West Coast.

    Winemakers around the world are already adapting to climate change, including by moving their vineyards to cooler zones and planting varieties that do better in drought and heat. Wildfires pose an additional and more immediate risk being tackled by scientists from Oregon State University, Washington State University and the University of California, Davis.

    “What’s at stake is the ability to continue to make wine in areas where smoke exposures might be more common,” said Tom Collins, a wine scientist at Washington State University.

    Researcher Cole Cerrato recently stood in Oregon State University’s vineyard, nestled below forested hills near the village of Alpine, as he turned on a fan to push smoke from a Weber grill through a dryer vent hose. The smoke emerged onto a row of grapes enclosed in a quasi greenhouse made of taped-together plastic sheets.

    Previously, grapes exposed to smoke in the MacGyvered setup were made into wine by Elizabeth Tomasino, an associate professor leading Oregon State’s efforts, and her researchers.

    They found sulfur-containing compounds, thiophenols, in the smoke-impacted wine and determined they contributed to the ashy flavor, along with “volatile phenols,” which Australian researchers identified as factors more than a decade ago. Bush fires have long impacted Australia’s wine industry. Up in Washington state, Collins confirmed that the sulfur compounds were found in the wine that had been exposed to smoke in the Oregon vineyard but weren’t in samples that had no smoke exposure.

    The scientists want to find out how thiophenols, which aren’t detectable in wildfire smoke, appear in smoke-impacted wine, and learn how to eliminate them.

    “There’s still a lot of very interesting chemistry and very interesting research, to start looking more into these new compounds,” Cerrato said. “We just don’t have the answers yet.”

    Wine made with tainted grapes can be so awful that it can’t be marketed. If it does go on shelves, a winemaker’s reputation could be ruined — a risk that few are willing to take.

    When record wildfires in 2020 blanketed the West Coast in brown smoke, some California wineries refused to accept grapes unless they had been tested. But most growers couldn’t find places to analyze their grapes because the laboratories were overwhelmed.

    The damage to the industry in California alone was $3.7 billion, according to an analysis that Jon Moramarco of the consulting firm bw166 conducted for industry groups. The losses stemmed mostly from wineries having to forego future wine sales.

    “But really what drove it was, you know, a lot of the impact was in Napa (Valley), an area of some of the highest priced grapes, highest priced wines in the U.S.,” Moramarco said, adding that if a ton of cabernet sauvignon grapes is ruined, “you lose probably 720 bottles of wine. If it is worth $100 a bottle, it adds up very quickly.”

    Between 165,000 to 325,000 tons of California wine grapes were left to wither on the vine in 2020 due to actual or perceived wildfire smoke exposure, said Natalie Collins, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers.

    She said she hasn’t heard of any growers quitting the business due to wildfire impacts, but that: “Many of our members are having an extremely difficult time securing insurance due to the fire risk in their region, and if they are able to secure insurance, the rate is astronomically high.”

    Some winemakers are trying techniques to reduce smoke impact, such as passing the wine through a membrane or treating it with carbon, but that can also rob a wine of its appealing nuances. Blending impacted grapes with other grapes is another option. Limiting skin contact by making rosé wine instead of red can lower the concentration of smoke flavor compounds.

    Collins, over at Washington State University, has been experimenting with spraying fine-powdered kaolin or bentonite, which are clays, mixed with water onto wine grapes so it absorbs materials that are in smoke. The substance would then be washed off before harvest. Oregon State University is developing a spray-on coating.

    Meanwhile, dozens of smoke sensors have been installed in vineyards in the three states, financed in part by a $7.65 million USDA grant.

    “The instruments will be used to measure for smoke marker compounds,” said Anita Oberholster, leader of UC Davis’ efforts. She said such measurements are essential to develop mitigation strategies and determine smoke exposure risk.

    Greg Jones, who runs his family’s Abacela winery in southern Oregon’s Umpqua Valley and is a director of the Oregon Wine Board, applauds the scientists’ efforts.

    “This research has really gone a long way to help us try to find: are there ways in which we can take fruit from the vineyard and quickly find out if it has the potential compounds that would lead to smoke-impacted wine,” Jones said.

    Collins predicts success.

    “I think it’s increasingly clear that we’re not likely to find a magic bullet,” he said. “But we will find a set of strategies.”

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  • Taiwan factory fire leaves at least 5 dead, more than 100 injured

    Taiwan factory fire leaves at least 5 dead, more than 100 injured

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    A fire and subsequent explosions at a golf ball factory in southern Taiwan have killed at least five people and injured more than 100 others, and five people are still missing

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 23, 2023, 1:45 AM

    BEIJING — A fire and subsequent explosions at a golf ball factory in southern Taiwan killed at least five people and injured more than 100 others, and five people are still missing.

    The fire began on Friday night at the factory in Pingtung county and raged overnight. Three firefighters were among the dead, authorities said.

    Rescuers were still looking for four factory workers and one firefighter who remained unaccounted for, officials said.

    More than 100 people were taken to the hospital with injuries.

    Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in a speech in Taipei on Saturday expressed her condolences to the families of the victims and said she would travel to Pingtung to visit those affected by the disaster, according to Taiwanese news outlet Focus Taiwan.

    Tsai said the Pingtung county government had set up an emergency operation center to offer assistance to those impacted by the fire.

    Chou Chun-mi, magistrate of Pingtung county, said in a Facebook post that the cause of the fire was still under investigation.

    “Facing the grief of the family members, I could not say anything except to bow deeply, apologize, and express my deepest condolences,” she said in the post, after visiting the funeral home and meeting with victims’ families.

    Authorities said that natural gas may have contributed to the explosions, which occurred as firefighters were attempting to put out the fire.

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  • Federal investigators subpoena Pennsylvania agency for records related to chocolate plant explosion

    Federal investigators subpoena Pennsylvania agency for records related to chocolate plant explosion

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    Federal safety investigators issued a subpoena to Pennsylvania’s public utility regulator on Monday for documents related to a fatal explosion at a chocolate factory, escalating a months-long legal dispute over the state agency’s authority to share the sensitive information.

    The National Transportation Safety Board said the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has refused to provide unredacted inspection and investigation reports for UGI Utilities Inc., the natural gas utility at the center of the probe into the March 24 blast at the R.M. Palmer Co. plant in West Reading.

    The powerful natural gas explosion leveled one building, heavily damaged another and killed seven people. Investigators have previously said they are looking at a pair of gas leaks as a possible cause of or contributor to the blast.

    The interagency dispute over five years’ worth of UGI records involved a conflict between state and federal law.

    The Public Utility Commission said it could not provide the records in the format that the safety agency demanded, citing a state law that protects “confidential security information” about key utility infrastructure from public disclosure, even to other government agencies.

    The commission said it offered safety investigators a chance to inspect the reports at its Harrisburg office or to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but the federal agency refused.

    “This is a unique situation where a federal agency is demanding that the PUC violate state law,” PUC spokesperson Nils Hagen-Frederiksen said in a written statement. “It is unfortunate that the NTSB has rejected possible solutions to this issue, but we continue working to resolve this impasse.”

    The safety board said federal regulations entitled it to the utility company records and asserted the PUC was required to turn them over.

    Because federal law preempts state law, NTSB chair Jennifer L. Homendy wrote to the state utility commission chair, the PUC “has no legal basis to withhold the … inspection reports from the NTSB in any manner.”

    In addition to issuing the subpoena, the safety agency said it also barred the Public Utility Commission from having any further role in the federal probe.

    “The actions of PA PUC have evidenced a lack of cooperation and adherence to our party processes and prevent your continued participation in the investigation,” Homendy wrote.

    About 70 Palmer production workers and 35 office staff were working in two adjacent buildings at the time of the blast. Employees in both buildings told federal investigators they could smell gas before the explosion. Workers at the plant have accused Palmer of ignoring warnings of a natural gas leak, saying the plant, in a small town 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of Philadelphia, should have been evacuated.

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  • Japan announces emergency relief measures for seafood exporters hit by China’s ban

    Japan announces emergency relief measures for seafood exporters hit by China’s ban

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    TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced on Monday a 20.7 billion yen ($141 million) emergency fund to help exporters hit by a ban on Japanese seafood imposed by China in response to the release of treated radioactive wastewater from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant.

    The discharge of the wastewater into the ocean began Aug. 24 and is expected to continue for decades. Japanese fishing associations and groups in neighboring countries have strongly opposed the release, and China immediately banned all imports of Japanese seafood. Hong Kong has banned Japanese seafood from Fukushima and nine other prefectures.

    Chinese trade restrictions have affected Japanese seafood exporters since even before the release began, with shipments held up at Chinese customs for weeks. Prices of scallops, sea cucumbers and other seafood popular in China have plunged. The ban has affected prices and sales of seafood from places as far away from Fukushima as the northern island of Hokkaido, home to many scallop growers.

    Kishida said the emergency fund is in addition to 80 billion yen ($547 million) that the government previously allocated to support fisheries and seafood processing and combat damage to the reputation of Japanese products.

    “We will protect the Japnaese fisheries industry at all costs,” Kishida said, asking people to help out by serving more seafood at dinner tables and other ways.

    The money will be used to find new markets for Japanese seafood to replace China and fund government purchases of seafood for temporary freezing and storage. The government will also seek to expand domestic seafood consumption.

    Officials said they plan to cultivate new export destinations in Taiwan, the United States, Europe, the Middle East and some southeast Asian countries — such as Malaysia and Singapore.

    Kishida talked with workers at Tokyo’s Toyosu fish market last Friday to assess the impact of China’s ban and pledged to protect Japan’s seafood industry.

    Kishida heads to Indonesia on Tuesday to attend the annual summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, where he may face criticism over the wastewater release from Chinese Premier Li Qian, who is also attending.

    Large amounts of radioactive wastewater have accumulated at the Fukushima plant since a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 destroyed its cooling systems and caused three reactors to melt.

    All seawater and fish samples taken since the release of the treated wastewater began have been way below set safety limits for radioactivity, Japanese officials and the plant operator say.

    Mainland China is the biggest overseas market for Japanese seafood, accounting for 22.5% of the total, followed by Hong Kong with 20%, making the ban a major blow for the fisheries industry.

    Seafood exports are a fraction of Japan’s total exports, and the ban’s impact on overall trade will be limited unless tensions escalate and China widens its restrictions to other trade sectors, said Takahide Kiuchi, executive economist at Nomura Research Institute.

    Beijing is angry over U.S. trade controls that limit China’s access to semiconductor processor chips and other U.S. technology on security grounds. Japan has also curbed exports of chipmaking technology. Such restrictions imposed by Tokyo and possible future steps could cause an escalation of Chinese trade bans against Japan, Kiuchi said.

    “Taking into consideration such risks, the Japanese government needs to carefully think about how to deal with worsening ties with China, not just over the treated water discharge but also how it should cooperate with the United States in areas of investment and trade restrictions with China,” Kiuchi said in a recent analysis.

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  • Rain and a wrong address delayed firefighters reaching a Philippine factory blaze. 15 people died

    Rain and a wrong address delayed firefighters reaching a Philippine factory blaze. 15 people died

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    A fire has killed 15 people in a small apparel factory in a Philippine residential area, where flooding, traffic and a wrong address delayed firefighters

    ByThe Associated Press

    August 31, 2023, 12:58 AM

    Firemen carry body bag of a victim of a fire in Quezon city, Philippines on Thursday, Aug. 31, 2023. A fire killed more than a dozen people Thursday in a small apparel factory in a Philippine residential area, where firefighters were delayed by flooding, traffic and a wrong address, a fire protection official. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

    The Associated Press

    MANILA, Philippines — A fire killed 15 people Thursday in a small apparel factory in a Philippine residential area, where firefighters were delayed by flooding, traffic and a wrong address, a fire protection official.

    Most of the victims appeared to be factory workers and carpenters who were sleeping in rooms when the fire broke out Thursday morning.

    Some were found dead on an aisle outside the rooms and the factory owner and his child were among the dead, Chief Superintendent Nahum Tarroza of the Bureau of Fire Protection said.

    Three people survived with injuries by jumping off the second floor of the two-story factory in panic, Tarroza said. The three were taken to a hospital.

    The firefighters’ arrival was delayed by about 14 minutes after a monsoon-season downpour and wind caused flooding and traffic jams and a wrong address was given to firefighters, Tarroza said.

    Tarroza said he would order an investigation into the firefighters’ delayed response.

    The fire in the Pleasant View residential enclave in Tandang Sora village in suburban Quezon city was extinguished in two hours. An investigation was looking into the cause and if safety regulations were breached by the factory owner, officials said.

    The factory stored combustible materials and textile used in making apparel and also printed designs on shirts used for business promotions, village officials said.

    Construction of buildings and residential enclaves that don’t conform to safety standards and lax enforcement of safety regulations have caused deadly fires in the Philippines in the past.

    A 1996 nightclub fire killed 162 people, mostly students celebrating the end of the school year, in Quezon city. About 400 people were packed in the Ozone disco when the fire started, but many were unable to escape because the emergency exit was blocked by a new building next door.

    Ninety-three others were injured in the blaze, one of the biggest nightclub fires in the world in recent decades.

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  • Rain and a wrong address delayed firefighters reaching a Philippine factory blaze. 15 people died

    Rain and a wrong address delayed firefighters reaching a Philippine factory blaze. 15 people died

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    A fire has killed 15 people in a small apparel factory in a Philippine residential area, where flooding, traffic and a wrong address delayed firefighters

    ByThe Associated Press

    August 31, 2023, 12:58 AM

    Firemen carry body bag of a victim of a fire in Quezon city, Philippines on Thursday, Aug. 31, 2023. A fire killed more than a dozen people Thursday in a small apparel factory in a Philippine residential area, where firefighters were delayed by flooding, traffic and a wrong address, a fire protection official. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

    The Associated Press

    MANILA, Philippines — A fire killed 15 people Thursday in a small apparel factory in a Philippine residential area, where firefighters were delayed by flooding, traffic and a wrong address, a fire protection official.

    Most of the victims appeared to be factory workers and carpenters who were sleeping in rooms when the fire broke out Thursday morning.

    Some were found dead on an aisle outside the rooms and the factory owner and his child were among the dead, Chief Superintendent Nahum Tarroza of the Bureau of Fire Protection said.

    Three people survived with injuries by jumping off the second floor of the two-story factory in panic, Tarroza said. The three were taken to a hospital.

    The firefighters’ arrival was delayed by about 14 minutes after a monsoon-season downpour and wind caused flooding and traffic jams and a wrong address was given to firefighters, Tarroza said.

    Tarroza said he would order an investigation into the firefighters’ delayed response.

    The fire in the Pleasant View residential enclave in Tandang Sora village in suburban Quezon city was extinguished in two hours. An investigation was looking into the cause and if safety regulations were breached by the factory owner, officials said.

    The factory stored combustible materials and textile used in making apparel and also printed designs on shirts used for business promotions, village officials said.

    Construction of buildings and residential enclaves that don’t conform to safety standards and lax enforcement of safety regulations have caused deadly fires in the Philippines in the past.

    A 1996 nightclub fire killed 162 people, mostly students celebrating the end of the school year, in Quezon city. About 400 people were packed in the Ozone disco when the fire started, but many were unable to escape because the emergency exit was blocked by a new building next door.

    Ninety-three others were injured in the blaze, one of the biggest nightclub fires in the world in recent decades.

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  • A gas platform explosion off Mexico kills 2 workers, injures 8 and leaves 1 missing, officials say

    A gas platform explosion off Mexico kills 2 workers, injures 8 and leaves 1 missing, officials say

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    Mexican officials say an explosion at an offshore gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico killed two workers, injured eight and left one missing

    MEXICO CITY — An explosion and fire destroyed an offshore gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico early Friday, while two workers died, eight were injured and one was missing, officials said.

    The state-owned oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, said the disaster happened on the Nohoch gas transfer platform that it operates. It said the dead and missing workers were employed by a subcontractor and three of the injured were company employees and five worked for the subcontractor.

    The company, known as Pemex, said none of the injuries were life-threatening.

    The company’s statement said seven ships evacuated a total of 321 workers from the platform. Photos distributed by the company showed several fire boats pumping streams of water onto the still-smoking platform.

    Octavio Romero, director of Petroleos Mexicanos, said that the platform “was totally destroyed,” but that four other nearby, linked platforms did not catch fire.

    There appeared to be little risk of an oil spill, though it was unclear whether the accident might force the company to increase flaring of gas, a process of burning excess gas that pumps large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

    Platforms like the one that burned receive gas from wells and pump it through pipelines to storage tanks or ships. Because some wells produce gas associated with oil, either oil production would have to be shut down until somewhere else was found to send the gas, or the gas would have to be flared off.

    Romero appeared to suggest the company would temporarily stop production at some wells, saying the accident was going to reduce production of crude oil “by several thousand barrels” per day.

    That would be a bad situation for the company, and Romero said “we need to rapidly return to production.”

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  • Canada is investigating why the Titanic-bound submersible imploded

    Canada is investigating why the Titanic-bound submersible imploded

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    The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said Saturday that it’s conducting an investigation into the loss of the Titan submersible and has been speaking with those who traveled on Titan’s mothership, the Polar Prince.

    The development comes as authorities from the U.S. and Canada began the process of probing the cause of the underwater implosion and grappled with questions of who was responsible for determining how the tragedy unfolded.

    Maritime agencies are searching the area in the North Atlantic where the vessel was destroyed, killing all five people aboard. Debris was located about 12,500 feet (3,810 meters) underwater, several hundred feet away from the Titanic wreckage it was on its way to explore.

    “We are conducting a safety investigation in Canada given that this was a Canadian-flagged vessel that departed a Canadian port and was involved in this occurrence, albeit in international waters,” said Kathy Fox, chair of the transportation board. “Other agencies may choose to conduct investigations and that’s up to them.”

    The Polar Prince left Newfoundland on June 16, towing the ill-fated Titan. There were 41 people on board — 17 crew members and 24 others — including the five who died when Titan imploded.

    Fox said she understands the international interest and that the TSB will share information they collect with other agencies, like the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the U.S. Coast Guard, within the limits of Canadian law. Voice recordings and witness statements are protected under Canadian law, she said.

    “Our investigation will go where the evidence leads us,” she added. “We don’t want to duplicate efforts. We want to collaborate.”

    The Royal Canadian Mounted Police also announced Saturday that they’ve initiated an examination of the circumstances that led to the Titan deaths to decide whether a full investigation is warranted. That full probe will only take place if it appears criminal, federal or provincial law may have been broken, officials said.

    The Coast Guard led the initial search and rescue mission, a massive international effort that likely cost millions of dollars.

    It was not entirely clear who would have the authority to lead what is sure to be a complex investigation involving several countries. OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the Titan, is based in the U.S. but the submersible was registered in the Bahamas. OceanGate is based in Everett, Washington, but closed when the Titan was found. Meanwhile, the Titan’s mother ship, the Polar Prince, was from Canada, and those killed were from England, Pakistan, France, and the U.S.

    The National Transportation Safety Board said Friday that the U.S. Coast Guard has declared the loss of the Titan submersible to be a “major marine casualty” and the Coast Guard will lead the investigation.

    The Coast Guard has not confirmed that it will take the lead.

    The deep-sea investigations promise to be long and painstaking, given the murky depths of the ocean.

    “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the seafloor,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the Coast Guard First District.

    How the overall investigation will proceed is complicated by the fact that the world of deep-sea exploration is not well-regulated.

    A key part of any investigation is likely to be the Titan itself. Questions have been raised about whether the vessel was destined for disaster because of its unconventional design and its creator’s refusal to submit to independent checks that are standard in the industry

    The Titan was not registered as a U.S. vessel or with international agencies that regulate safety. And it wasn’t classified by a maritime industry group that sets standards on matters such as hull construction.

    OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was piloting the Titan when it imploded, complained that regulations can stifle progress.

    “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” Rush wrote in a blog post on his company’s website.

    One question that seems at least partially resolved is when the implosion likely happened. After the Titan was reported missing, the Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data and found an “anomaly” Sunday that was consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the vessel was operating when communications were lost, said a senior U.S. Navy official.

    The Navy passed on the information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search because the data was not considered definitive, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system.

    The Titan launched at 8 a.m. that day and was reported overdue that afternoon about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Rescuers rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the area.

    Any sliver of hope that remained for finding the crew alive was wiped away early Thursday, when the Coast Guard announced that debris had been found near the Titanic.

    Killed in the implosion were Rush, two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

    A flurry of lawsuits is expected, but filing them will be complex and it’s unclear how successful they will be. Plaintiffs will run into the problem of establishing jurisdiction.

    At least 46 people successfully traveled on OceanGate’s submersible to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, that oversees matters involving the Titanic shipwreck.

    But questions about the submersible’s safety were raised by both by a former company employee and former passengers.

    ___

    LeBlanc reported from Boston. Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor in Washington; Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia; Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire; David Sharp, in Portland, Maine; and Gene Johnson in Seattle contributed to this report.

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  • How the unconventional design of the Titan sub may have destined it for disaster

    How the unconventional design of the Titan sub may have destined it for disaster

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    BOSTON — The deadly implosion of the Titan submersible raises questions about whether the vessel exploring the Titanic wreckage was destined for disaster because of its unconventional design and its creator’s refusal to submit to independent checks that are standard in the industry.

    All five people aboard the Titan died when it was crushed near the world’s most famous shipwreck, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said Thursday, bringing an end to a massive multinational search that began Sunday when the vessel lost contact with its mother ship in the unforgiving North Atlantic.

    The Titan, owned and operated by OceanGate Expeditions, first began taking people to the Titanic in 2021. It was touted for a roomier cylinder-shaped cabin made of a carbon-fiber — a departure from the sphere-shaped cabins made of titanium used by most submersibles.

    The sphere is “the perfect shape,” because water pressure is exerted equally on all areas, said Chris Roman, a professor at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. Roman had not been on the Titan but has made several deep dives in Alvin, a submersible operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.

    The 22-foot long (6.7-meter long), 23,000-pound (10,432-kilogram) Titan’s larger internal volume — while still cramped with a maximum of five seated people — meant it was subjected to more external pressure.

    Elongating the cabin space in a submersible increases pressure loads in the midsections, which increases fatigue and delamination loads, said Jasper Graham-Jones, an associate professor of mechanical and marine engineering at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom.

    Fatigue, he said, is like bending a wire back and forth until it breaks. Delamination, he said, is like splitting wood down the grain, which is easier than chopping across the grain.

    Furthermore, the Titan’s 5-inch thick (12.7 centimeters) hull had been subjected to repeated stress over the course of about two dozen previous dives, Graham-Jones said.

    Each trip would put tiny cracks in the structure. “This might be small and undetectable to start but would soon become critical and produce rapid and uncontrollable growth,” he said.

    OceanGate promoted the Titan’s carbon fiber construction — with titanium endcaps — as “lighter in weight and more efficient to mobilize than other deep diving submersibles” on its website. It also said the vessel was designed to dive four kilometers (2.4 miles) “with a comfortable safety margin,” according to court documents.

    But carbon composites have limited life when subject to excessive loads or poor design which leads to stress concentrations, Graham-Jones said.

    “Yes, composites are extremely tough. Yes, composites are extremely long lasting. But we do have issues with composites and the fact that composites fail in slightly different ways than other materials,” he said.

    OceanGate was also warned that a lack of third party scrutiny of the vessel during development could pose catastrophic safety problems.

    David Lochridge, OceanGate’s then-director of marine operations, said in a 2018 lawsuit that the company’s testing and certification was insufficient and would “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible.”

    He advocated for “nondestructive testing,” such as ultrasonic scans, but the company refused.

    Ultrasonic testing can help spot areas inside the structure where the composites are coming apart, said Neal Couture, executive director of a professional organization called the American Society for Nondestructive Testing.

    “Once this thing is going down and going under stress, it’ll affect those materials, it’ll affect those composites,” Couture said Friday. “Nondestructive testing is how you would then assess those structures and say, ‘OK, they’re still viable,’ or, ‘they’re still susceptible.’”

    The Marine Technology Society, an organization of ocean engineers, technologists, policymakers and educators, also expressed concern to OceanGate about the size of the Titan, the construction material and the fact that the prototype wasn’t being examined by a third party.

    “We were very afraid that without that certification process, they might be missing something,” Will Kohnen, the organization’s chairman said Friday. He sent a letter to the company in 2018 warning that its “current experimental approach … could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

    Graham-Jones said it’s standard procedure in engineering to seek outside expertise the ensure that vessels conform to the highest industry standards.

    In a 2019 company blog post, OceanGate criticized the third-party certification process as one that is time-consuming and stifles innovation.

    “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” the post said.

    Famed undersea explorer Robert Ballard, who first located the Titanic wreckage in 1985, called the lack of outside certification and classification a “smoking gun” in the vessel’s failure.

    “We’ve made thousands and thousands and thousands of dives with other countries as well to these depths and have never had an incident,” he said Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

    “Titanic” director James Cameron, who has made multiple descents to the wreck, said there are several possible reasons for the submersible’s destruction, but the most likely is a failure of the composite hull.

    “The question is, was it the primary failure, or a secondary failure from something else happening?” he told “Good Morning America” on Friday. “And I’m putting my money on the composite because you don’t use composites for vessels that are seeing external pressure.”

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  • Cooking gas explosion kills 31 people at a barbecue restaurant in northwestern China

    Cooking gas explosion kills 31 people at a barbecue restaurant in northwestern China

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    Authorities in northwestern China say 31 people have been killed and seven injured in a cooking gas explosion at a barbecue restaurant in the city of Yinchuan

    BEIJING — A massive cooking gas explosion at a barbecue restaurant in northwestern China killed 31 people and injured seven, Chinese authorities said Thursday.

    The blast tore through the establishment at around 8:40 p.m. Wednesday on a busy street in Yinchuan, the capital of the traditionally Muslim Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, as people were gathering on the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

    The festival is a national holiday devoted to eating rice dumplings and racing boats manned by teams of paddlers.

    Chinese President Xi Jinping demanded all-out treatment of the injured and a safety overhaul after the explosion, Xinhua reported.

    Online news site The Paper cited a woman identified only by her surname Chen saying she had been about 50 meters (164 feet) from the restaurant when she heard the explosion. She described seeing two waiters emerge from the restaurant afterward, one of whom collapsed immediately, while thick smoke billowed from the restaurant and a strong smell of cooking gas permeated the area.

    The Central Government’s Ministry of Emergency Management said on its social media account that search and rescue work at the restaurant was completed early Thursday morning and investigators were sent to determine the cause of the blast.

    Industrial accidents of this type are a regular occurrence in China, usually attributed to poor government supervision, corruption, cost-cutting measures by employers and little safety training for employees.

    At least nine people were killed in an explosion at a Chinese petrochemical plant, and three others died in a helicopter crash during the country’s May Day holiday.

    In February, 53 miners were killed in the collapse of a massive open pit coal mine in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, leading to numerous arrests, and four people were detained over a fire at an industrial trading company in central China in November that killed 38 people.

    The central government has pledged stronger safety measures since an explosion in 2015 at a chemical warehouse in the northern port city of Tianjin killed 173 people, most of them firefighters and police officers. In that case, a number of local officials were accused of having taken bribes to ignore safety violations.

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  • Cooking gas explosion kills 31 people at a barbecue restaurant in northwestern China

    Cooking gas explosion kills 31 people at a barbecue restaurant in northwestern China

    [ad_1]

    Authorities in northwestern China say 31 people have been killed and seven injured in a massive cooking gas explosion at a barbecue restaurant in the city of Yinchuan

    BEIJING — A massive cooking gas explosion at a barbecue restaurant in northwestern China killed 31 people and injured seven, Chinese authorities said Thursday.

    The blast tore through the establishment at around 8:40 p.m. Wednesday on a busy street in Yinchuan, the capital of the traditionally Muslim Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, as people were gathering on the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

    The festival is a national holiday devoted to eating rice dumplings and racing boats manned by teams of paddlers.

    Online news site The Paper cited a woman identified only by her surname Chen saying she had been about 50 meters (164 feet) from the restaurant when she heard the explosion. She described seeing two waiters emerge from the restaurant afterward, one of whom collapsed immediately, while thick smoke billowed from the restaurant and a strong smell of cooking gas permeated the area.

    The Central Government’s Ministry of Emergency Management said on its social media account that search and rescue work at the restaurant was completed early Thursday morning and investigators were sent to determine the cause of the blast.

    Industrial accidents of this type are a regular occurrence in China, usually attributed to poor government supervision, corruption, cost-cutting measures by employers and little safety training for employees.

    At least nine people were killed in an explosion at a Chinese petrochemical plant, and three others died in a helicopter crash during the country’s May Day holiday.

    In February, 53 miners were killed in the collapse of a massive open pit coal mine in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, leading to numerous arrests, and four people were detained over a fire at an industrial trading company in central China in November that killed 38 people.

    The central government has pledged stronger safety measures since an explosion in 2015 at a chemical warehouse in the northern port city of Tianjin killed 173 people, most of them firefighters and police officers. In that case, a number of local officials were accused of having taken bribes to ignore safety violations.

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  • Boeing halts shipments of the 787 Dreamliner for a flaw in the tail section of the planes

    Boeing halts shipments of the 787 Dreamliner for a flaw in the tail section of the planes

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    Boeing is holding up deliveries of its 787 Dreamliner because of yet another manufacturing problem

    Boeing said Tuesday that deliveries of its 787 Dreamliner have been halted again by another manufacturing issue, the latest in a string of setbacks affecting the two-aisle jet.

    The company said it is inspecting fittings on part of the tail called the horizontal stabilizer “for a nonconforming condition.” The inspections and repairs will affect near-term deliveries but won’t alter the company’s forecast of deliveries for the full year. Boeing did not say how many planes are affected by the new defect.

    Boeing said the flaw in the tail is not a safety issue and planes already in airline fleets can keep flying. The company said it notified the Federal Aviation Administration and airlines.

    The 787 and the 737 Max have both been plagued by production defects that have sporadically held up deliveries and left airlines without planes that they expected to have for the peak summer season.

    In April, Boeing found a problem with fittings on Max jets were the fuselage meets the vertical section of the tail.

    A month before that, deliveries of the 787 were stopped while federal regulators looked over documentation of work that was done on new planes. Shipments of 787s have been stopped several times in the past three years because of production issues.

    The delays hurt Boeing because buyers usually pay a large part of the purchase price on delivery.

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  • Probe of chocolate factory blast focuses on gas pipeline

    Probe of chocolate factory blast focuses on gas pipeline

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    Federal safety officials are investigating the role of a natural gas pipeline in a fatal blast at a Pennsylvania chocolate factory

    ByMICHAEL RUBINKAM Associated Press

    Federal safety officials are investigating the role of a natural gas pipeline in a fatal blast at a Pennsylvania chocolate factory, the National Transportation Safety Board announced Tuesday.

    Friday’s powerful explosion at R.M. Palmer Co. killed seven people, sent 10 to the hospital and damaged several other buildings in West Reading, a small town 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of Philadelphia, where the 75-year-old, family-owned company has long had a factory.

    The National Transportation Safety Board announced the probe late Tuesday afternoon, calling the incident a “natural gas” explosion and fire. The agency has preliminary information from local authorities and a natural gas utility that a gas pipeline was involved, an agency spokesperson, Keith Holloway, told The Associated Press.

    NTSB is investigating “what caused, how and why the explosion occurred,” according to Holloway.

    Other local, state and federal investigations are ongoing.

    Pennsylvania State Police have said “everything’s on the table” as fire marshals also try to pinpoint the origin and cause. Some workers told relatives they smelled natural gas before the blast, although the gas utility UGI said it received no reports of a gas leak.

    “UGI is cooperating with authorities in the investigation concerning the incident at R.M. Palmer,” utility spokesperson Joe Swope said late Tuesday. He directed further questions to the NTSB.

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