Helicopter crash kills 13 near Norway oil platform

OSLO, Norway — A helicopter carrying 13 people from an oil field in the North Sea to the city of Bergen crashed Friday off the Norwegian coast, and there were no signs of survivors.

Eleven passengers and two pilots — identified as 11 Norwegians, one Briton and one Italian — were en route from the Gullfaks B oil platform of the Norwegian energy company Statoil, the company and Norwegian authorities said. The cause of the crash was unclear.

A search on land and at sea recovered 11 bodies, according to the Norwegian Joint Rescue Coordination Center, which was conducting the rescue operation with assistance from Statoil. The center said on Twitter that the two other passengers were also presumed dead, and that the rescue operation had been halted.

Television footage showed thick smoke rising from the island of Turoy, northwest of Bergen, on Norway’s southwest coast. A rescue boat could also be seen.

George Langeland, who lives in Turoy, said he saw the helicopter explode and fall from the sky from the terrace of his home. “It was a large explosion,” he said by telephone from the island. “I don’t know better how to describe it.”

Langeland added that he saw the rotor break off the helicopter. Part of the helicopter’s hull was underwater, about 65 feet from the shore, with debris scattered around it, according to the rescue team.

Rescue coordinators told journalists that a flight ban, including for drones, had been imposed for three nautical miles around the site of the crash, and a Statoil spokesman said the company had grounded all helicopters like the one that crashed — a Eurocopter EC225, known as the Super Puma. Morten Eek, the Statoil spokesman, also said that production aboard the Gullfaks B had been temporarily halted.

The same type of helicopter crashed in Norway in 1997, killing 12 people, the last fatal crash the country’s oil industry suffered, according to Henrik Fjeldsbo, a union officer and adviser to the Department for Health and Security in the Energy Industry.

Torstein Boe / AFP / Getty Images A rescue vessel lifts pieces of the helicopter that crashed off Norway’s coast with 13 people who were returning to land from Statoil’s Gullfaks B oil platform. The crash’s cause was unclear, but the company grounded all similar helicopters.