The State oil company SOCAR reported. The Reuters report noted that this statement may be out of date, and the SOCAR Facebook page also said that 26 workers were rescued on Saturday. Officials say 42 workers have been rescued.
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SOCAR said that the fire at the platform was caused by the windstorm, which damaged a gas line.
It was unclear whether any of the missing workers would be found alive.
The company lost five workers in 2013 and 14 past year in similar accidents, said Mirvari Qahramanli, head of the Center for Protection of Oil Workers’ Rights, a Baku-based advocacy group.
Rescue efforts on Friday were reportedly hampered by the ongoing storm.
In 2010, an explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and sent millions of barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Azerbaijan’s media quoted various sources saying more than 60 people were on the rig when the storm hit.
In a separate incident which occurred on Friday, three SOCAR workers went missing from another of the company’s offshore oil platforms in the Caspian after an accident during the storm.
The fire was still burning Saturday night, the statement said.
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Another 44 are still stranded near the platform waiting to be rescued, though they are now at a safe distance from the blaze that began Friday in a gas pipeline of the structure, located in the Guneshli oilfield. The workers were still missing as of Saturday.
