NEWFOUNDLAND — The mayor of a small town in southern Newfoundland which had been home to two of the 17 people killed in last week’s offshore helicopter crash said the full impact of the tragedy has yet to arrive.
Fortune Mayor Alec Noseworthy said developments in the crash of the Cougar Helicopters aircraft have been dominating everyone’s thoughts, especially as they attended church services on Sunday.
By Tim Bradner, Alaska Journal of Commerce
Offshore development off Alaska’s coasts could create an annual average of 35,000 new jobs in Alaska and $72 billion in total new payroll over a 50-year period, according to a study by the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research and Northern Economics Inc.
The growth in jobs resulting from outer continental shelf development could also lead to a 5 percent increase in statewide population, the study said. Most of the growth would be concentrated in Alaska’s existing population centers but small coastal communities near the exploration areas could see dramatic expansion, the researchers said.
FALMOUTH — Deep sea divers from Truro, Falmouth and Helston, who face charges of plundering treasure from a Spanish shipwreck, are considering accepting a plea deal offered by the country’s authorities.
The deal would see the three men receive a 12 month suspended sentence, fined in excess of £5,000 and left with a criminal record for a crime they insist they did not commit.
NORFOLK — During his 10-year career as a Navy diver, Chris Johnson helped recover victims and wreckage from a capsized ferry in Haiti, a Civil War ironclad, a fallen spacecraft and TWA Flight 800.
“I was proud to be a part of these operations and many, many others,” he told a crowd at the Nauticus museum Saturday. But none of it would have been possible, he said, without Carl Brashear, the Navy’s first black master diver.
“The barriers he broke down, enabled a guy like me… to be able to do something that I could come here and talk to you about today,” said Johnson, who now works for a diving equipment company in New Jersey.
By Bradley Bouzane, Canwest News Service
Recovery crews off the coast of Newfoundland have started to retrieve bodies from the crash site of a helicopter crash that claimed 17 lives.
One body was recovered from the site Sunday, which leaves 15 others unaccounted for following the Thursday’s crash that happened as the Cougar Sikorsky S-9 helicopter was headed out to two offshore oil sites.
LAFAYETTE, LA — cDiver.net, the commercial diver network for the international subsea labor sector, has just recorded its 1,000th registered member in just under 2 months of existence.
cDiver.net’s quick growth can be attributed to the leadership of two marketing professionals, Adam Broetje and Nathan Peterson, who began developing the site in November 2008. With the goal of building the largest network of commercial divers in the world, cDiver.net is obviously well underway.
Survival rates for people in Canadian helicopters that have crashed into water over the past three decades are the same as those around the world, a report published last year determined.
There were 46 civilian helicopters registered in this country that ditched in water from 1979 to 2006, resulting in 27 deaths among the 124 passengers and crew, according to an article published in the October issue of Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine.
Offshore oil rig workers, it is oft repeated, have one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. In safer parts of the globe, the weather and workplace injuries are the most common threat to life and limb. But in volatile regions, like the Middle East or the Nigerian coast, the platform and crew face the added peril of terrorism or piracy.
But rarely do we spend time pondering the perils of actually going to work on an oil rig. That will change, for a while at least, in the wake of Thursday’s helicopter crash off Newfoundland in which 17 lives are feared lost. One passenger is confirmed dead and the lone known survivor is in hospital.
J. Ray McDermott, S.A. (“J. Ray”), a subsidiary of McDermott International, Inc., announced today that it was recently awarded additional work under the Long-Term Agreement (LTA) with Saudi Aramco.
This latest project, which is expected to continue through 2010, consists of the procurement, fabrication and installation of three decks, jackets, associated pipelines, and the installation of three new shallow water crude oil pipelines, totaling 15 kilometers in length, in the South Safaniya oil field, offshore Saudi Arabia. The pipelines will divert crude oil production flow from three existing platforms to other facilities before reaching the Safaniya onshore Gas Oil Separator Plant.
Around 5,000 subsea and platform wells will require decommissioning in the North Sea with the majority to be dealt with by 2025. Total value? About £15 billion.
Existing well technology will allow two thirds of those wells to be abandoned by rigless operations but new techniques will be required to dealt with the rest, says the report, which was prepared for Oil and Gas UK through its well abandonment work group by Acteon subsidiary InterAct Activity Management.