The Matanzas Supertanker Base, partially destroyed by the largest industrial fire in the history of Cuba last August, will recover its full storage capacity –200,000 cubic meters– within four years. In a note published this Wednesday by Granma, It is reported that work to rebuild the first of the four damaged tanks will begin this January, without specifying the date.
“It is planned to level the land until the required demand is achieved and, once the base with its foundation is built, they will undertake the mechanical assembly of the deposit, which is estimated to be in the month of April,” says the official newspaper, which publishes photos of the current state of the place, assuring that “it does not look anything like the one left by the fatal accident”.
The first structure will be completed within a period of 16 months, in which, he says Granma, “There is a specialized force and they have the required materials and supplies.”
Although the newspaper says that it is “a deposit very similar to those demolished”, it explains the differences well. To begin with, that the diameter of the tanks will be less than that destroyed and that they will have an underground electrical system, without alluding to the official cause of the fire, a failure in the lightning rod system.
The distance between the new deposits will be 110 meters, almost four times more than what they had before
In addition, the distance between the new deposits will be 110 meters, almost four times more than before. Until now, the authorities have not recognized that the short distance between the tanks could have been one of the factors in the seriousness of the incident, as numerous experts pointed out at the time.
Other new measures implemented will be, lists the organ of the Communist Party, the size of the containment dam, greater than the capacity of the tank, “in such a way that, in the event of a spill, all the crude remains concentrated there”, and that this dam is arm “with earth covered with concrete, a quality that prevents the collapse of that structure when it is attacked by fire.”
Finally, Granma assures, the base will have “more powerful foam cannons” and “a new position for firefighters in case of emergency, established at a greater distance from the container.”
The text does not refer at any time to the 17 dead and 146 injured caused by the incident, nor to the fact that the remains of the majority could not be recovered from the first, some of them young people who were undergoing military service and not professional firefighters.
Neither does he mention the aid, announced a few days after the fire, that the island would receive from Venezuela to rebuild the base, and limits himself to praising the work of Emcor Matanzas, whose employees “have already interconnected more than 2,000 meters of pipes of different diameters , underground and aerial, new lines that displaced the defective ones as a result of the fire”.
Thanks to the support of the Government of Caracas, the Supertanker Base was built just ten years ago, in an industrial enclave launched in the 1980s with the help of the extinct Soviet Union.
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