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Serious damages on drilling rig

The "Saturn" makes it back to Murmansk after serious weather trouble in the Pechora Sea.

The “Saturn” lost one of its lifeboats and got its helipad destroyed in last week’s Arctic storm, pictures of the rig show.

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Greenpeace has now made available photos from the rig as it Wednesday this week entered the Kola Bay. The pictures show that the helicopter pad has been damaged and that one of the lifeboats is gone.

As previously reported, the “Saturn” left the Dolginskoye field in the Pechora Sea on 6th November and was hit by a tough Arctic storm on the subsequent day. For several days, the rig had to seek shelter near the Kanin Peninsula.

“This is yet another example of how oil drilling in extreme Arctic waters can go terribly wrong because of extreme weather conditions”, Erlend Telles, Arctic campaign leader in Greenpeace Norway, says to BarentsObserver.

“The incident is the latest in the serious of accidents and near-accidents in the Arctic the last years”, he adds and mentions both the Kullik rig in Alaska and the tragic wreckage of the Kolskaya rig in 2011. In the latter accident as many as 53 people died.