U.S. issues hurricane rule for drilling platforms

Reuters: With the start of the hurricane season just over six weeks away, the U.S. Interior Department on Tuesday issued a rule to make sure offshore oil and gas drilling platforms have a better chance of surviving big storms.

The department hopes to avoid the type of severe damage done to the U.S. energy sector by Hurricane Katrina and other storms during the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons that destroyed 123 drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and damaged dozens of others, knocking out a big chunk of domestic oil and gas production for months.

Photo of offshore oil platforms by Chad Teer of Coquitlam, Canada, from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License