The incident happened this morning on an oil production platform owned by Houston-based Black Elk Energy.

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Traditional blue-collar labor is often associated with rational control, along with modern high-reliability organizations, such as military, public safety, nuclear energy production, and oil platform operations.

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While drilling in that depth of water was prohibitively expensive a decade ago, it's now easy for a company Triton's size to rent a drillship to find the oil and set up a floating production platform to process it.

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