Staff of Petroleos of Mexico (Pemex) and the Secretaries of the Navy and National Defense will travel to Cuba to help put out the fire in two fuel oil tanks in an industrial area in the city of murders.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador stressed that he had instructed the three government agencies to send technicians and specialists.

“There was an explosion, an oil tank started to burn, then another, and there are missing, injured. We will also help to control the fire, I gave this instruction to Pemex and the Armed Forces of Mexico,” he said during his work tour in Colima.

The President of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, He thanked the governments of Mexico, Venezuela, Russia, Nicaragua, Argentina and Chile for their support.

Fire in oil tanks in Matanzas, Cuba

The city murdersWest of Cubalives in anguish this Saturday before the fire of two oil tanks in an industrial zone which until now leaves 17 missing and 77 injured by burns.

A new report published by the official newspaper Granma brings to 77 the number of injuries caused by the incident, including three in critical condition, three others very serious and 12 serious.

In addition, 17 missing are reported, “firefighters who were in the area closest” to the fire, reported the presidency, which added that “Cuba has asked for help and advice from friendly countries with experience in the oil file”.

“Extinguishing the fire may still take time,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel commented on Twitter, while the director of commerce and supply of the Cuba-Petroleum Union (Cupet) State, Asbel Leal, clarified that the country had never faced a fire “of the magnitude that we have today”.

We follow in #Massacres. We visited the injured and held a meeting with the provincial authorities. It is urgent to find the firefighters who disappeared in the explosion and to take care of their families. The situation is difficult but we will also get out of it. #ForceMatanzas pic.twitter.com/AzJvGy9tVT

— Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) August 6, 2022

The fire broke out on Friday afternoon after lightning struck one of the tanks at the supertanker base on the outskirts of Matanzas, 100 kilometers east of Havana, at 7:00 p.m. local time. At 5 a.m. this Saturday, the fire spread to a second warehouse.

“We ran away”

“The noise was felt, like a wave of air bringing you back,” Laura Martínez, a resident of the town of La Ganadera, about two kilometers from the scene of the accident, told AFP.

Mario Sabines Lorenzo, governor of Matanzas, reported that there were around 800 evacuees.

When the first explosion occurred, Yuney Hernández and his family left their home in La Ganadera. They came back “around three in the morning” because the children were sleepy, the 32-year-old woman told AFP.

But around 05:00 they started to hear more explosions, “it was as if pieces of the tank were falling”, he added.

Ginelva Hernández, 33, lives in the same community with her husband and three children. “We went to bed around 3:30 p.m. and at 4:45 p.m., we felt the bombs explode, like thunder. We jumped out of bed, when we came out to the street the sky was yellow,” the woman told AFP. “People’s fear on the street is uncontrollable,” he said.

According to Cupet, the first field “contained about 26,000 cubic meters of domestic crude oil, or about 50% of its maximum capacity,” when it was struck by lightning. The second tank contained 52,000 cubic meters of fuel oil.

“Lightning Rod Failure”

“Apparently there was a fault in the lightning rod system, which could not withstand the energy of the electric discharge,” according to Granma.

Danger Ricardo, a 37-year-old welder who works at the site, cannot explain how the tanks’ lightning rod system failed.

The two reservoirs feed the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, the largest in Cuba, but the pumping to this plant has not stopped, Granma added.

Two helicopters began working on extinguishing tasks on Saturday morning in front of the bay in Matanzas, a city of 140,000 people.

Groups of exhausted firefighters gathered outside the plant waiting to pick up their colleagues who were unable to get out during the second explosion.

The blaze comes at a time when the island has struggled since last May to meet increased energy demand from the summer heat.

The obsolescence of its eight thermoelectric power stations, breakage, scheduled maintenance and the lack of fuel weigh on electricity production.

Since May, the authorities have programmed outages of up to 12 hours a day in certain regions of the country. Since then, there have been twenty demonstrations in towns in the interior of the island.

Cuba It currently has an average electricity distribution capacity of 2,500 megawatts, insufficient for household demand at peak consumption hours, which reaches 2,900 megawatts, according to official information.