Coast guard boats and aircraft have covered an area larger than the state of Rhode Island to search for 12 people still missing on Wednesday off the Louisiana coast after their offshore oilfield vessel capsized in hurricane-force winds.
One worker’s body was recovered on Wednesday and six people were rescued on Tuesday after the Seacor Power overturned on Tuesday afternoon in the Gulf of Mexico, the coast guard said.
Capt Will Watson said winds were 80-90mph and waves were 7 to 9 feet (2.1 to 2.7 meters) when the Seacor Power lift vessel overturned.
“That’s challenging under any circumstance,” Watson said. “We don’t know the degree to which that contributed to what happened, but we do know those are challenging conditions to be out in the maritime environment.”
Asked about the prospects of the missing crew, he said: “We are hopeful. We can’t do this work if you’re not optimistic, if you’re not hopeful.”
Divers were heading to the local area on Wednesday afternoon, a coast guard spokesman, John Micheli, said.
The Lafourche parish president, Archie Chaisson III, said time was critical in the rescue effort, especially because more rough weather was in the forecast.
“The hope is that we can bring the other 12 home alive,” Chaisson said.
The Seacor Power is a bulky vessel that has three long legs it can lower to the sea floor to become an offshore platform. It flipped over on Tuesday afternoon miles south of Port Fourchon, a major base for the US oil and gas industry.
The coast guard vessel Heartland said in a statement at around 8pm on Tuesday that it and several other vessels responded to an area of the Gulf of Mexico south of Grand Isle after the 129ft Seacor Power overturned. A search plane also flew in to assist.
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Chaisson confirmed that 18 people were on board before the Seacor Power took on water in rough seas, the New Orleans Advocate reported.
Hit by the storm, it flipped over, with one of the legs pointed awkwardly skyward as rescuers searched for the workers in rough seas.
A witness, Simon Bruce, published a post on social media saying he was on a boat near the Seacor Power at the time of the capsizing and never heard so many mayday calls at once in his life. Bruce’s post said other boats had also flipped and were taking on water.
“Please pray for the lost,” he added.
New Orleans and areas off Louisiana’s shore were being hit by an unexpectedly strong storm that overturned vessels and damaged property, particularly in coastal towns.
Aaron Callais, a shrimp boat captain, said the bad weather started with small, quickly dissipating waterspouts that buffeted his father’s boat, the Ramblin’ Cajun.
“There was nothing we could do. One minute we were facing north, the next south, then east and west,” he said. “Things were flying in the cabin.”
Callais posted video on Facebook of wind battering the boat as he talked on the satellite phone to friends and family, including his dad, “letting him know the situation, that it wasn’t looking good. We didn’t know if we were going to make it out.”
