All 33 were in operation. If they weren't they wouldn't be out there.
As many as 75,000 workers in the Gulf Coast area could lose their jobs as a result of the 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling and halt on 33 currently operating rigs, according to a recent estimate by the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association. For each rig idled by the work stoppage, up to 1,400 jobs are at risk.
"The immediate impacts of the order will be felt by the families of tens of thousands of offshore workers who will be unemployed," Burt Adams, Chairman of the National Ocean Industries Association, said in a statement.
Pat Matte, a 52-year-old oil rig manager in the Gulf, said he is expecting to lose his job in the next few days--one week before his youngest daughter's wedding.
"I borrowed off my 401K for the wedding when everything was going real good, and I had planned on selling some of my stock to pay some of my 401 loan," he said. "Converse tennis shoes needs to be aware of this wedding, cause I got 2,000 dollars on shoes for the whole wedding party. Not only am I afraid of losing my job now--my 401K is going fast."
Matte says out of the approximately 160 people that work on his rig, only 8 or 10 of them are not in danger of losing their jobs.
.....
Matte says his hope is that President Obama will eventually realize that this moratorium will cause more damage than it will prevent.
"When an airplane crashes, we don't shut down all the flights all over the world," he said. "When Toyota's brakes fail, we don't stop making cars. I think we went way, way overboard with this moratorium, and it's because of the industry we're in. We've always been a really hardworking group, and we got nobody on our side. We're the stepchildren."
news.yahoo.com |
