Three dead in explosion at Mexican oil plant

A massive explosion rocked a major petrochemical facility of Mexican national oil company Pemex in the Gulf state of Veracruz on Wednesday, killing three people, injuring dozens more, and pumping a cloud of noxious chemicals into the sky.
Luis Felipe Puente, head of federal emergency services, said that three people had died in the blast. The governor of Veracruz State, Javier Duarte, later said on his Twitter account that105 were hospitalized, including 58 Pemex workers.

Pemex said the explosion, which sent a huge, dark plume of smoke billowing upwards, occurred just after 10 pm (SAST) at the facility’s chlorinate 3 plant near the port of Coatzacoalcos, one of the company’s top oil export hubs.

Local emergency officials said hundreds of people had been evacuated from the site. A company official said local oil exports were unaffected. What caused the blast was unclear, but Pemex warned local residents to keep away from the site due to what it described as a dissipating cloud of toxic fumes.

Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo (PMV), a vinyl petrochemical plant that is a joint venture between Pemex’s petrochemical unit and Mexican plastic pipe maker Mexichem was the facility hit by the blast. Operated by Mexichem, the plant lies within Pemex’s larger Pajaritos petrochemical complex.

Mexico is in the midst of a historic push to lure private investors to revive its oil industry. Pemex, which enjoyed a decades-long monopoly over Mexico’s oil and gas industry until an energy reform opened up the sector in 2014, has experienced a series of high-profile accidents.

In 2013, at least 37 people were killed by a blast at its Mexico City headquarters, and 26 people died in a fire at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico in September 2012.

In February, a fire killed a worker at the PMV plant, which makes vinyl chloride monomer, also known as chloromethane, an industrial chemical used to produce plastic piping.

The incident occurred just weeks after three workers were killed and seven injured when a fire broke out on a Pemex oil-processing platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It also came as Pemex implements deep cost cuts to cope with the rout in oil prices, and seeks to stem a slide in output.

The post Three dead in explosion at Mexican oil plant appeared first on AfrikMouth.

from AfrikMouth http://ift.tt/1Tl9eBR
via JimiVaey