Explosions and fire in an oil depot in Cuba: 70 injured and 17 missing

A fire caused by the impact of lightning in an oil storage tank in the Cuban city of Matanzas caused four explosions and more than 70 people injuredofficials and official agencies reported in the early hours of Saturday.

The incident began Friday night, when a thunderstorm occurred in the area of ​​the Matanzas supertanker base, the Ministry of Energy and Mines tweeted.

The fire could not be extinguished despite the work of the firefighters and specialists, so it continued on Saturday morning, also involving the adjacent containers.

Authorities reported at least four explosions and two burning tanks in this city of nearly 140,000 inhabitants, located about 100 kilometers from Havana, near the bay of the same name.

The Facebook page of the Matanzas provincial government reports that the number of injured has risen to 77 people, while there have been 17 missing. The Presidency of the Republic specified that the 17 are “the firefighters who were in the nearest area trying to prevent the spread”.

Three local reporters covering the news were also injured in one of the morning blasts, but are out of danger.

“Smell of sulfur”

“I was in the gym when I heard the first explosion. A column of smoke and a terrible fire rose in the skies,” said Adiel González, a 32-year-old language graduate and resident of Matanzas.

“The city has a strong sulfur smell,” he said Associated Press by phone.

González said he heard more explosions in the early hours and that They sounded “like bombs”.

The authorities indicated it evacuated the neighborhood closest to the affected areathe cast of Dubrocq, but González added that some people have decided to move away from another, called Versalles and a little further away from the Supertanker Base.

There were many ambulances, police and fire brigade vehicles everywhere.

Energy crisis

The fire came at a time when Cuba is having great difficulty in finding oil – it has to buy half of what its market requires – to meet the demand for its energy system and reduce blackouts, which overwhelm the population.

The amount of fuel consumed by the flames is unknown until now, but since it is a national bill, its destination would have been the thermoelectric plants.

The two tanks feed the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, the largest in Cuba, but the pumping at that plant has not stopped, the official newspaper reports. grandmother.

The obsolescence of the eight thermoelectric plants, breakdowns, scheduled maintenance and lack of fuel hinder the production of energy.

The program of the authorities from May blackout up to 12 hours a day in some regions of the country. Since then, there have been twenty protests in cities in the interior of the island.

According to the Cuban news agency, the affected container was at 50% of its capacity e the lightning rod that had the base could not protect the power of the discharge. The fire then spread to a second tank.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel went to the fire area at dawn.

Local meteorologist Elier Pila showed satellite images of the area, which showed a dense column of black smoke moving west from the point of the fire and reaching the far east of Havana, the capital.

“That plume (as it appears) can be nearly 150 kilometers long,” he wrote on his Twitter account.

Source: AP

CB