to, does it sound like a natural gas explosion to you? >> caller: our understanding is it was a natural gas production platform. whether it was natural gas that exploded or whether there could be a fire of some other kind on the rig, i think we just don't know yet. >> ben castleman is a reporter for "the wall street journal." thanks for your time. appreciate it. cnn is your hurricane headquarters and we want to get you the up-to-date information on hurricane earl. reynolds wolf is tracking it for us. give us the latest that you have. >> it's still a powerhouse there are some good signs, we'll get to those this due course. what we know is it is a category four storm, the strongest one on the planet. winds are up to 140, gusts to 165 miles per hour. a couple of things we're seeing right now look pretty favorable for this thing to actually weaken. one thing we're seeing if you look at the last couple of frames of this, you'll see a little bit of drier air that's trying to invade, getting a