Gulf Oil Industry Prepared for Long Haul Back After Gustav

HOUSTON - Even before Gustav's landfall, the Gulf of Mexico's oil industry was planning its return — and warning that experience dictates patience: after Katrina and Rita in 2005, some platforms took more than a year to come back.

Companies evacuated more than 75,000 platform and rig workers last week, flying them to shore in round-the-clock helicopter runs. The first reconnaissance flights over the offshore fields are expected within hours of the storm's passage.

The industry's geography has not changed since 2005, when Katrina and Rita together destroyed more than 100 platforms and damaged 50 more. What has changed, operators say, is preparation: rigs have been hardened, mooring standards raised and emergency plans rehearsed.

Katrina's lesson was that underwater pipelines, not the platforms themselves, caused the longest outages. Pipelines shifted by the storm kept some fields offline for months.

Refiners along the coast shut methodically, filling storage tanks and securing units against flooding. Refineries damaged in 2005 took weeks to restart; those flooded took months.

"Everybody compares every storm to Katrina now," said a refinery manager in Port Arthur, Texas. "We shut down early, we staff up early, and we don't make promises about restart dates until we've flown the pipeline routes."

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