Coast Guard medevacs worker from ExxonMobil platform in Gulf of Mexico

The U.S. Coast Guard medevaced a 54-year-old crew member from an ExxonMobil-operated oil platform some 150 miles east of Corpus Christi on Thursday.

Coast Guard Sector and Air Station Corpus Christi watchstanders received a call at 10:20 p.m. on Wednesday from personnel on the ExxonMobil-operated Hoover-Diana oil platform stating a crew member was experiencing a ‘cardiac event’.

According to a statement by the Coast Guard, the watchstanders consulted with the duty flight surgeon, who recommended a medevac.

An HC-144 Ocean Sentry airplane crew from Air Station Corpus Christi and an MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew from Coast Guard Air Station Houston were launched to assist.

The Dolphin crew arrived on the scene, landed on the oil rig, and brought the patient aboard. The crew transferred him to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in stable condition.

The Hoover-Diana fields are located in the Gulf of Mexico, 258 kilometres south of Galveston. Diana covers several lease blocks, but is largely contained within East Breaks (EB) blocks 945 and 989 – also covering EB 946 and EB 988.

Hoover is located in the Alaminos Canyon blocks 25 and 26 some 20 kilometres east of Diana. The field was discovered in 1990 and successfully appraised in 1997. The two fields contain estimated recoverable reserves exceeding 300 million oil-equivalent barrels.

The Diana reservoir is being drained from a six-well subsea development, tied back to a deep draft caisson vessel (DDCV), located over Hoover. The Hoover DDCV consists of a cylindrical hull buoyed with air-filled compartments in the upper portion of the hull, which was ballasted with seawater and fixed ballasts in the bottom compartments.

On top of the steel hull, the DDCV production facilities are designed to handle 100,000 barrels per day of crude, 325 million cubic feet per day of gas, and produce up to 60,000 barrels per day of water.