“In less than 15 minutes, the area of the TA-1 transformer was completely on fire, which caused temperatures between 1.00 and 1,500 degrees Celsius,” said Seberina Ortega, general coordinator of forensic investigation and expert services of the FGJ- CDMX at a press conference on February 19, 2021.
Despite this, the transparency committee of the FGJ-CDMX determined in August 2021 to classify as reserved the information related to the expert opinions and methodologies with which they concluded that the fire was not caused or that it was derived from a lack of maintenance.
To one year …
In addition to the damage caused to the electrical power supply systems, the traffic control center – the equivalent of the control tower at an airport – located on the fifth floor of the Buen Tono building was also inoperable.
Authorities from the Metro and the Federal Electricity Commission immediately carried out the necessary work to install systems to generate energy.
In less than 15 minutes, the TA-1 transformer area was completely on fire (…) “.
Seberina Ortega, FGJ-CDMX expert
On January 12, lines 4, 5 and 6 of the Metro restarted their operations with five, eight and 11 trains, respectively. The challenge was to operate without a traffic control system, so various measures were applied, including analog radio communication equipment.
Lines 1, 3 and 2 began operations on January 25, February 1 and 8, respectively.
Serranía management will be audited
This Sunday, PAN deputies in the Congress of Mexico City announced that they will audit the administration of the former director of the Metro, Florencia Serranía, who left office in June 2021, as they considered that her management left pending accounts such as the fire in the Buen Tono building, the fall of Line 12, the train crash at the Tacubaya station in 2020, as well as various failures in all lines due to lack of maintenance.
“Not because (Florencia Serranía) is gone, things are going to stay that way, we reach out to users who have a complaint, a complaint to raise their voices,” said deputy Luis Chávez.
In a message in front of the Buen Tono substation in the central building of the Metro, the blue and white legislators warned that starting this week they will begin tours of different stations and facilities of this transport system to report any anomaly due to lack of maintenance to the network.
For his part, the deputy Federico Döring criticized that one year after the fire, the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office had only offered “carnal” expert opinions, whose objective was to exonerate Florencia Serranía for the lack of maintenance of the metro facilities.
