Word: oiling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...teachers, nurses and secretaries, long underpaid and underappreciated, are being wooed with much more favorable terms. At the same time, cyclical industries that have been through dry spells during the past few years are coming back only to find their labor forces depleted. Many workers from the long-depressed oil-and-gas industry found new careers after they were laid off, and do not care to return to the unpredictable energy business. Texas- based Zapata Gulf Marine, whose tugs supply offshore rigs, has been forced to lay up three of its 354 ships because it cannot find chief engineers...
...first thing you do when you arrive on an offshore ((oil)) installation," the British author A. Alvarez wrote in a book on the subject in 1986, "is arrange how to get off it again in an emergency." For the 227 men aboard the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea last week, there was no time for such procedures...
...explosion ripped the rig in two, enveloping it in a ball of flame and smoke. Miraculously, 63 crew members survived, some with severe burns, the majority with only minor injuries. But 166 died, including two rescuers. It was the worst disaster in the 25-year history of North Sea oil exploration...
...British government promised a thorough inquiry, as did the Piper Alpha's owner, Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp. After the accident, Occidental promptly shut down the pipeline that services Piper Alpha and five other platforms, thereby temporarily cutting British North Sea oil production by 12.9%. The losses in export earnings and tax revenues from Piper Alpha alone were expected to cost the British government at least $1.2 billion a year, while the losses to insurance companies were likely to exceed $1 billion. Occidental Chairman Armand Hammer promised a contribution of $1.7 million to a Piper Alpha disaster fund...
Lloyd Bentsen, campaigning with Dukakis in Texas last week, may have peaked as well. An oil-state millionaire remembered for his aborted $10,000 breakfast club, the Senate Finance Committee chairman sets off special-interest alarms in some quarters. His claim to being the only Democrat to have beaten George Bush in Texas is a little long in the tooth (it happened in 1970), and his campaign style on display last week was stolid and uninspiring...