Oil & gas operator determined to find root cause of fatal fire incident on offshore platform

Perenco Oil and Gas Gabon, a subsidiary of the Anglo-French oil and gas player Perenco, has taken steps to get to the bottom of a fire incident, which took place at its offshore platform located off the coast of Gabon. This tragic incident led to the death of five workers while one worker remained missing.

On March 27, a week after the fire incident on its Becuna platform on the Simba field offshore Gabon, Perenco provided an update on the situation. The company confirmed that international experts arrived on Monday, March 25, in Port-Gentil to assist with the process of identifying those who tragically died in the incident. These experts joined forces with the authorities in charge of the investigation.

Last week, the search for the missing person was still actively underway, with new land-based resources covering more than 90 km of coastline, along with the air and sea resources already mobilized. In collaboration with Spie Oil & Gas Gabon, Perenco is coordinating assistance to the victims’ families with the support of the Union Pétrolière Gabonaise (UPEGA), representing the entire oil sector in Gabon.

Given the technical complexity of the incident, Perenco underlined that it was mobilizing independent experts specializing in the analysis of similar events, aiming to determine the precise causes, circumstances, and reasons, as yet undetermined, that led to the tragic fire.

“The safety of staff working on our sites is our absolute priority. We will do everything in our power to establish the cause of this accident, in collaboration with the Gabonese authorities, and take the necessary measures to ensure that it never happens again,” emphasized Perenco.

Even though significant progress has been made in making work on oil and gas platforms safer, this tragic incident has once again sparked debates about the right way to get workers ready for such high-pressure emergencies and the responsibilities of operators in training their staff to face these types of events.