The maneuvers to rescue the last worker trapped under the rubble of the landslide occurred this friday at the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, in Matanzas, they are complicated. local television, TV Yumurireported that, of the four technicians who were buried under the bricks and soot, one died and two others were rescued and receive medical attention at the Faustino Pérez hospital.
A wall or “partition” seven meters high collapsed on the four workers who cleaned the soot in the chimney of the plant at 2:30 p.m. this Friday. The firefighters managed to extract two of them, identified by the authorities as Ángel Dionis Pérez and Maikel López Navarro, 30 and 35 years old, respectively, but a third, Alexis Bernardo Labrada, 47, had already died.
Lázaro Moreno Pita, the last of the trapped workers, has not yet been able to be rescued because removing him “is not advisable until the danger hanging over the heads of the rescuers is removed,” the rescue team explained to TV Yumurí. He added that “in order to avoid an accident in the rescue work, it has been decided to use a technical means capable of evacuating and removing a dangerous layer of soot that threatens to come off.” This, he assures, constitutes an alternative strategy to protect both the lives of the firefighters and the possible survivor.
This Saturday morning, the general director of Guiteras, Misbel Palmero, reported that a “hammer” would be made available to rescuers, used in the remodeling of the Saratoga hotel in Havana, partially destroyed by an explosion in May 2022, to “break the outer wall” and “access and remove the soot by another way.” However, the tool will not arrive in Matanzas for another 5 hours.
The local press has published sporadic reports, in the last hours, which allow us to take the pulse of the seriousness of the situation. During the early morning, “given the danger of a collapse inside and due to the large mass of soot concentrated against one of the walls,” the rescuers had to partially withdraw to analyze the scene.
However, this analysis, the authorities notified, does not slow down the search for Moreno, because while they think about finding an alternative way to remove “the volume of soot and brick”, they continue to extract as much debris as possible.
There are no guarantees that Moreno is alive several hours after the accident, but authorities ask that “pessimism be avoided until the truth is discovered.” It was also reported that a fifth worker, who was not in the collapse, was sent to the hospital with “eye injuries from soot.”
The Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant –the largest in the country and with French technology– has been in use for 35 years, after its inauguration in 1988. Its facilities have lacked the necessary maintenance required by plants that process nationally extracted oil, with a high content of sulfur and very corrosive to metals. According to the official Ecured encyclopedia, Guiteras is the “most efficient generating unit” of the National Electric System (SEN), with a generation capacity, under normal conditions, of more than 280 megawatts per hour.
The authorities have not offered details about the causes of the incident, which occurred in the lower part of the chimney known as the “ashtray”.
The authorities have not offered details about the causes of the incident, which occurred in the lower part of the chimney known as the “ashtray.” The precariousness of the structures also explains why the Guiteras service has been very unstable over the last year, characterized by an unprecedented energy crisis and the collapse of the SEN.
In the past months, the official press has reported numerous disconnections from Guiteras, which translate into blackouts of more than twelve hours on the Island. It is expected that the excess demand for electricity in the hottest months in Cuba, already very nearby, bring a new season of power outages.
After a recent breakdown that caused the SEN thermoelectric plant to exit, the authorities announced that they planned a capital repair in Guiteras at the end of this year. “Not all the causes or all the problems are going to be solved. These are works that have to be carried out in capital maintenance, which can last up to six months,” explained the engineer Edier Guzmán Pacheco, director of Thermal Generation of the Unión Eléctrica, to the Explain that all the work currently being carried out at the thermoelectric plant is provisional.
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