Reportedly, an Oklahoma natural gas drilling rig exploded near the town of Watonga last night. The drilling rig has around-the-clock workers and about a dozen workers were working at the time of the explosion, but they were reported to have evacuated right before it. The explosion occurred at about 10:30pm local time.
About two dozen homes were evacuated and two dozen firefighters “are working to contain the blaze and evacuate homes until oil company representatives can arrive to extinguish the blaze,” according to NewsOK. As you can see from the video above, the initial flames were pretty high.
At about 5:00 am today, it was reported that most of the evacuated families were allowed to return to their homes. Luckily, no one was severely affected by this explosion.
The companies involved in the explosion are Continental Resources and Patterson Drilling.
Can’t imagine something like this happening with a wind turbine or solar power plant, can you?
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Nick
Accidents do happen. The drilling businees is a dangerous job done by humans. Minimizing all loss is the response that should be judged, not that the accident happened. On the real issue and a couple of your other articles, I believe that big money should be put into the research and development of most all understood alternative energy sources. We should even throw some good money searching for the possibility of other energy sources that we are not currently pondering. I do not agree that the only way we think we can justify the research and development is by the increase in the delivered cost of fossil fuel to the consumer. Alternate energy sources are not & will not be economically competitive with any fossil fuel until we further develop several areas of the power generation, storage & transportation necessities.
It seems, many of use are willing to pay more to live our lives as ever increasing overhead costs are applied to conventional energy sources in an attempt to justify alternate sources as an economic alternative. The need for alternate sources is justified for all the reasons we all know and discuss.. We could be putting that increase in conventional energy costs to work trying to find the right alternatives while keeping what we all buy every day reasonably priced which includes, reasonably regulated.
Zachary Shahan
Well, the research has been done on the most notable alternative energy sources. And they are being deployed. More money needs to be put into faster deployment than research.
Wind power is already the cheapest option for new electricity in many or even most regions. (http://cleantechnica.com/world-wind-power/)
Solar is the best bet in the long run for most people and is projected to be the cheapest within a few years. (http://cleantechnica.com/2011/08/23/solar-power-intro-3-key-solar-power-points-top-solar-power-news/ ) And the potential is insane — the solar energy hitting Texas in one month is equal to ALL the energy the texas gas & oil industry has EVER produced: (http://cleantechnica.com/2011/10/20/texas-solar-energy-hitting-state-in-1-month-all-energy-texas-oil-gas-industry-has-ever-produced/ )
Some researchers have shown how the whole world could be powered by renewable energy by 2030. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030
Some think natural gas is an important transition fuel away from coal. Others don’t buy it. I’m on the line. But, clearly, the natural gas industry has some issues to resolve if it is going to continue growing.
Misty
You say this wouldn’t happen with wind. But do you realize how many jobs would be lost by this action. My husband works on a rig and in this tough economy he would have a hard time finding a new job. Freak accidents happen everyday.
Zachary Shahan
I understand the difficult economic situation we’re in, which is why we should be putting our money in the most job-creating and secure energy systems (i.e. solar and wind)