Blast at Oil Facility Injures 3 – Hundreds Evacuated
An explosion rocked a facility of Mexican national oil company Pemex in the major oil export hub of Veracruz state on Wednesday, injuring at least three workers, but oil exports ere not affected, the company said.
The blast sent a dark plume of smoke billowing into the sky, the latest in a litany of accidents at operations of the state company whose infrastructure has been strained by years of under-investment.
Pemex said on Twitter that an accident occurred at the facility’s chlorinate 3 plant near the port of Coatzacoalcos, one of the company’s major oil export hubs.
Pemex said so far it had received reports of three injured workers.
Local emergency officials said hundreds of people had been evacuated from the site. Television footage showed a towering plume of smoke.
The incident took place at the facility’s vinyl petrochemical plant Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo (PMV), a joint venture between Pemex’s petrochemical unit and Mexican plastic pipe maker Mexichem. The plant is located within Pemex’s larger Pajaritos petrochemical complex.
Mexichem did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In February, a worker was killed in a fire at the (PMV) plant, which produces vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), also known as chloroethene, an industrial chemical used to produce plastic piping.
The incident comes just weeks after three workers were killed and at least seven injured when a fire broke out on a Pemex oil processing platform in the Gulf of Mexico.
It also comes as Pemex fights to stem a slide in output that has hammered the company as it seeks to implement deep cost cuts given sharp losses in oil prices, and as Mexico seeks to lure private investors to revive its flagging oil industry.
Pemex, which enjoyed a decades-long monopoly over Mexico’s oil and gas sector until an energy reform opened up the sector in 2014, has suffered a series of high-profile accidents.
In 2013, at least 37 people were killed by a blast at Pemex’s Mexico City headquarters, and another 26 people died in a fire at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico in September 2012.
A 2015 fire at its Abkatun Permanente platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche affected oil output and cost the company, which has been battered by low oil prices and is desperately trying to lower costs, up to $78million
