Lagos | Three crew members of an oil tanker that caught fire and sank off Nigeria last week have been found alive, with seven others still missing, the company that owns the ship said.
An explosion of undetermined origin caused a fire on Wednesday – brought under control the next day – on the FPSO vessel “Trinity Spirit”, a floating oil installation off the coast of Delta State, in southern Nigeria, the first producer of crude oil. Africa.
FPSOs are floating units ensuring the production and storage of oil or natural gas extracted at sea by platforms.
Ten crew members were on board at the time of the incident.
“Three crew members were found alive,” said Sunday evening the general manager of the exploration and production company Shebah (Sepcol), Ikemefuna Okafor, owner of the ship.
Mr. Okafor added that a “body was discovered near” the ship, without being able to say whether it was a crew member because “his identity has not yet been established”.
“Our joint efforts … are aimed at establishing the location, safety and security of the seven crew members still missing, cleaning up and limiting damage to the environment and establishing the cause of the explosion. »
According to Sepcol, the “Trinity Spirit” had a processing capacity of 22,000 barrels per day and a storage capacity of two million barrels.
The number of barrels stored in the ship at the time of the explosion is still unknown, but this incident raises fears of a major oil spill.
However, Idris Musa, director of Nigeria’s Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (Nosdra), told AFP on Sunday that there was “no oil spill incident so far. , only oil in small quantities”.
Oil spills are frequent in Nigeria but they generally affect the Niger River and its tributaries, and more rarely the maritime space.
The Niger Delta ecosystem has been ravaged by decades of oil exploitation. Oil companies are regularly singled out for their responsibility in ecological disasters, as are criminal groups that pierce pipelines to loot crude oil.