Friday March 16 1:38 PM ET
World's Biggest Oil Rig Listing, 9 Men Missing

By Luiz Andre Ferreira

MACAE, Brazil (Reuters) - The world's biggest offshore oil rig, owned by Brazil's oil giant Petrobras, was still leaning steeply toward the ocean on Friday but was stable a day after a series of explosions that apparently killed 10 people.

Officials at Brazil's largest company said they had higher hopes the giant 40-story platform would not sink. But if it did, pipelines to underwater wells could snap, sparking what could be the country's worst environmental disaster, according to engineers.

``The rig is stable for now, but if we don't manage to right it, it will continue sinking,'' said a Petrobras spokesman. It was listing around 30 degrees, or three times more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but was unchanged from Thursday.

Three powerful blasts rocked the rig off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state on Thursday, causing a fire that killed at least one of the 175 workers. The cause of the explosion is still unknown.

Petrobras has said that there is little chance that another nine who were missing had survived, but search and rescue operations resumed with the first rays of light on Friday while the company rushed to try and bolster the sagging platform.

``If the rig sinks there is the distinct possibility that some or all of the 21 pipelines could rupture,'' said Argemio Pertence, director of the Association of Engineers who worked for Petrobras for 25 years. ``It would be a catastrophe.''

He said that if it does not sink there is virtually no risk of environmental damage. No spills have been reported so far.

Mourning And Protests

If the death toll climbs, the incident could also be Petrobras' worst accident since 1984 when 36 people were killed in a platform explosion and fire.

Another worker was in a hospital with severe burns and doctors described his condition as ``very serious'' on Friday.

Petrobras lamented the incident in a statement in main newspapers: ``It was an accident of serious proportions and particularly painful as it involves the loss of human lives.''

Meanwhile, public outrage mounted against accident-prone Petrobras, which has had two major oil spills and a series of accidents in which 81 oil workers died over the last three years.

Oil workers at one of the country's biggest refinery Reduc held a two-hour protest wearing black arm bands before punching in and employees at another refinery held a moment of silence for the victims of the explosion.

``I don't know if I'll be able to go back to work,'' said a platform worker in Macae, where Petrobras' heads up offshore operations for Rio state. ``I've always known that there is a constant risk but this just makes you think again.''

Workers accuse Petrobras of outsourcing work to inexperienced workers to cut costs, thus putting employees at risk and endangering the environment.

In January 2000, a Petrobras pipeline in Rio's scenic bay ruptured. The spill coated scores of marine birds and fish. The oil giant dumped almost four times as much crude into a major river six months later.

LOSSES OF $50 MILLION A MONTH

It was still not clear what caused the blasts at the rig, located in the Roncador oil field 78 miles (125 km) offshore in the Campos Basin, which produces 80 percent of crude in Brazil's booming oil industry.

But damage to one of a support columns threatened to send the rig, insured for $500 million, sinking into the sea.

If the immense platform, whose deck is now dipping into the water, did sink, it could also dump the 250,000 gallons of diesel and 62,500 gallons of crude stored on the rig into the open sea.

Petrobras said it had five ships around the rig able to contain this potential spill.

The P-36 rig can produce up to 180,000 barrels of crude oil per day, making it the world's biggest platform, but after starting operations last year, it was only pumping out 80,000 bpd, or 5 percent of Brazil's total daily output.

All production was halted and Petrobras said it could lose $50 million a month with the rig out of operation. Oil imports would then rise, hurting Brazil's fragile trade balance.

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