An aerial view of the Deer Park Manufacturing Complex is seen in Deer Park, Texas, U.S. August 31, 2017. REUTERS/Adrees Latif
Less than three weeks have passed and two fires have been recorded at the Deer Park refinery facilities in Texas, which was purchased by Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) from Shell in January 2020, for an amount of almost 600 million dollars.
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However, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador dismissed the last of these incidents during his morning conference this Wednesday, where he revealed that he was not informed about what had happened and said that it was possibly not a serious incident.
“Surely there could have been an accident, but the refinery is operating well. It has a productive capacity of over 80 percent. It processes 340,000 barrels of crude oil per day and has 80 or a little more than its capacity, it’s fine, even with profits, it may be that an accident has happened, but it has a very strict maintenance program,” said the president.
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The fire was reported on social networks, by users who shared a video where a black human column is seen in the place where the refinery is located.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador AMLO (Reuters)
However, Pemex has so far not issued information on this incident, although it did respond to questions made by international agencies.
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According to Reuters, Pemex informed him via email that “the site’s emergency response team is on the scene and is working to mitigate the incident.” Subsequently, it also reported that the incident was controlled within a period of 20 minutes, that there were no human losses and that the damage was being evaluated.
Another fire was recorded at this refinery on February 23, the day on which two incidents were also documented at Pemex plants in Mexico, one of them in Ixhuatlán, Veracruz, and another of them at the Minatitlán refinery, in the same state.
Of these three events, Pemex has only presented public information on those that occurred in the state of Veracruz, reporting and updating in subsequent days on the number of deaths and injuries.
But Deer Park, whose purchase was described by President López Obrador in January 2021 as “a good operation”, has not been reported.
Information in development…