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The Doyon 26 rig in the Fiord Wes Kuparuk resevoir in February 2019. (Judy Patrick \/ ConocoPhillips Alaska) <\/p>\nThe Doyon 26 rig in the Fiord Wes Kuparuk resevoir in February 2019. (Judy Patrick \/ ConocoPhillips Alaska) <\/p>\n
A massive drilling rig operating on ConocoPhillips\u2019 behalf toppled over while traveling along a gravel road on Alaska\u2019s North Slope on Friday afternoon, local and company officials said. <\/p>\n
No one was seriously injured and all personnel were accounted for in the incident, which occurred around 4:45 p.m. Friday and involved the Doyon 26 rig<\/a>, ConocoPhillips Alaska and the North Slope Borough said in a joint prepared statement. <\/p>\n ConocoPhillips said Saturday that eight people \u2014 two who were on the rig during the incident and six initial responders \u2014 had received medical treatment at clinics nearby and were released.<\/p>\n The resulting fire after the rig toppled over was \u201ccontained and controlled\u201d as of Friday evening with emergency responders at the scene, according to their statement. <\/p>\n ConocoPhillips and the borough said that \u201cthere was no damage to local community infrastructure and no impact to pipelines or fuel transportation.\u201d<\/p>\n By Saturday afternoon, the response had shifted to \u201can environmental impact assessment and mitigation effort,\u201d with traffic flow resuming, ConocoPhillips Alaska said.<\/p>\n Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy wrote on social media<\/a> that he has \u201cbeen in contact with ConocoPhillips leadership\u201d and that there \u201cappears to be minimal damage to the environment\u201d so far. <\/p>\n ConocoPhillips was \u201cworking on plans to recover the rig,\u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n The Doyon 26 rig, which is nicknamed \u201cThe Beast\u201d and was ordered<\/a> by ConocoPhillips in 2016, set a long-distance drilling record<\/a> in Alaska in 2022 and helped the producer unlock oil from a section of western North Slope oil fields.<\/p>\n At 9.5 million pounds, it was hailed as the largest mobile land rig in North America with the ability to develop about three times as much area as conventional rigs.<\/p>\n The rig was built, owned and operated by Doyon Drilling, which is owned by Doyon, an Alaska Native regional corporation.<\/p>\n ConocoPhillips said Saturday that Doyon Drilling \u201cis leading response and recovery efforts under a Unified Command structure including representatives from the State of Alaska, the Federal Government and the North Slope Borough.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Doyon 26 rig in the Fiord Wes Kuparuk resevoir in February 2019. (Judy Patrick \/ ConocoPhillips Alaska)…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":540592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[147922,64,28174,126501,2091,238600,270,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-540591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-alpine","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-drill","11":"tag-drilling","12":"tag-field","13":"tag-kuparuk","14":"tag-oil","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115952871391075563","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}