Oil Rigs and Hurricane Ike

Don’t blame the reader for being confused. In its front-page piece today examining the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Ike, The Washington Post said this about the storm’s affect on the Gulf’s oil infrastructure:

Federal officials said there were no reports of major damage to the region’s critical oil, gas and petrochemical installations.

That sounds like good news, except that on page A-9, The Post runs another piece under the headline “Gas Prices Continue to Rise as Hurricane Destroys Oil Facilities:”

Gasoline prices once again soared across the country yesterday as federal officials said a preliminary survey of damage found that a number of production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico had been destroyed by Hurricane Ike.

One assumes these were not the same federal officials.