One year after the large-scale fire at the Matanzas Supertanker Base, which left 17 people dead, the Cuban regime is advancing in the reconstruction of the place and announced the creation of a memorial to the victims.
The incident occurred at sunset on August 5, 2022 when lightning struck a tank with 40,000 gallons of fuel. The flames spread to three other tanks – which stored fuel oil and crude from the Antonio Guiteras refinery, in Matanzas Bay – for several days.
In the early morning of August 6, 14 people disappeared when a second fuel oil tank exploded, very close to where the firefighters were trying to put out the flames of the first tank that had been set on fire the day before, to prevent the combustion from spreading. Three other firefighters were located in the early hours and died at the hospital.
Although the regime has described the extinction of this fire, considered one of the worst disasters on the island, as heroic, it has still not explained why it brought four young recruits of the Compulsory Military Service to the front line of an event of such magnitude without Experience: Leo Alejandro Doval Pérez de Prado (19 years old), Fabián Naranjo Núñez (20 years old), Michel Rodríguez Román and Adriano Rodríguez Gutiérrez.
This week it was announced that a group of artists and architects will erect a Memorial for the 17 deceased in the fire.
The work will be led by the creators Yanelys Mijenes Perdomo and Osmany Falcón (Lolo) and “will serve to exalt the heroism and unity of the nation in the face of the tragedy, it is the proposal of a group of artists and architects from Matanzas,” he specified. on Facebook the Company of Architecture and Engineering Projects of Matanzas (EMPAI).
At the Base, for its part, the remains of the damaged structures were demolished with the help of heavy equipment, especially the last fragments of the metal walls of the four damaged fuel tanks; and some 20 buildings, including the buckets of the burned tanks, the laboratory and the water tank, reported the official newspaper Granma.
In a first stage, large volumes of demolished material were extracted, and a large amount of scrap and extracted steel sheets.
According to the newspaper, the soil was subjected to bioremediation, “a technique with which the spilled crude is collected, and then it is concentrated in a designed space in which the necessary substances for its degradation are applied.”
Rigel Rodríguez Cubells, director of the Matanzas Fuel Marketing Territorial Division, reported that the lines that transport fuel to the docks and vice versa have been secured, ducts that were calcined and were completely replaced; and it is planned to interconnect the pipe lines and create facilities towards docks one and two, which allows the loading of crude oil to different ships.
Hundreds of meters of 20-inch tubes have also been welded, and the supports were built to facilitate the interconnection of the lines, the electrical channels were replaced, and the other four 50,000-cubic-meter capacity tanks that remained were connected to the technological system. Disused since the fire.
“At the moment the editing of the second of the nine rolls of steel sheets from the first deposit“, precise information.
Rodríguez Cubells affirmed that at the moment the Base has water as a guarantee for its fire extinguishing system, and that a project to extract seawater with the use of powerful pumps has been approved to increase the flow of the liquid.
He added that a new active lightning rod system will be installed on isolated towers and not on deposits, as was the case up to now. He said that the distinctive feature of these lightning rods is that they dissipate lightning rather than attract it.
The first deposit now under construction will be very similar in its structure to the damaged one, pointed out the head of the investment area in the Company, Liber Sams Toledo.
This is an internal floating aluminum membrane and a geodesic dome. The deposit will be surrounded by an earth and concrete dam, located about 110 meters from the tank, a structure that in the event of an accident will allow one and a half times the capacity of the deposit to be collected.
“We are in the second phase of the recovery process since in the first stage we concentrated on demolishing the facilities affected by the fire and creating conditions for the construction of the new tanks,” he explained in April to xinhua the director of the Comercializadora de Combustibles Territorial Division, Rigel Rodríguez, a chemical engineer who was in charge of the work at the base.
Sams Toledo details that the assembly of the second of the nine rolls of steel sheets in this tank is currently being completed and it is expected to progressively recover the 200,000 cubic meters of fuel storage that were lost with the fire in the four tanks.
Several brigades of Cuban workers have worked on all these tasks.
The extinction of the fire at the Matanzas Supertanker Base took six days and nights. More than a hundred people were hospitalized, a community of about twenty houses displaced, and only after the flames were extinguished was the regime able to start the search for the 14 missing: Adriano Rodríguez Gutiérrez, Andy Mitchel Ramos Sotolongo, Areskys Quintero Orta, Dios del Nazco Vargas, Fabián Naranjo Núñez, Leo Alejandro Doval Pérez de Prado, Luis Ángel Álvarez Leyva, Luis Raúl Aguilar Zamora, Michel Rodríguez Román, Osley Marante Guerra, Osmani Blasco Sosa , Pablo Ángel López Martell, Raciel Alonso Martínez and Rolando Oviedo Sosa.
Witnesses who managed to escape when the flames spread to the second tank said that the fire engulfed the firefighters and the rest of the missing people, many of whom were support personnel such as piperos.
Dr. Jorge González Pérez, who led the group of experts in charge of searching for and identifying these people, concluded that 14 groups of skeletal remains had been found, which coincided with the number of missing persons.
At the press conference where details of the find were presented, the specialist stated that it was not possible to absolutely identify the remains of any of them, due to the absence of the three essential elements to make the recognition (deca fingerprint, dental samples and of DNA), destroyed by the prolonged exposure of the bodies to temperatures between 1,000 and 2,000 degrees Celsius.
The grandmother of the youngest firefighter, recruit Leo Alejandro Doval Pérez de Prado, questioned the sending of the Mandatory Military Service recruits to the place: Who is going to take responsibility for getting those kids there?. His grandson had turned 19 and received only 15 days of training as a firefighter, he said.
There is still no government response on the subject, nor on the security failures that caused the accident and the death of the victims.
