At Least 39 Killed in Blast at Refinery in Venezuela

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/world/americas/explosion-at-venezuela-refinery.html

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CARACAS, Venezuela — At least 39 people were killed on Saturday and dozens more were injured in a giant explosion that set off a raging fire at Venezuela’s largest oil refinery, according to officials who rushed to the scene on the Paraguaná Peninsula.

Rafael Ramírez, the energy minister, who is president of Pétroleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil company that runs the refinery complex, said the blast occurred at 1:15 a.m. and was caused by a gas leak.

Shortly before the explosion, workers at the Amuay refinery detected the buildup of a cloud of gas and began to respond, Mr. Ramírez said, but it was already too late.

“All this happened very fast, and the explosion occurred almost immediately,” Mr. Ramírez said in televised remarks.

The national oil company, also known as PDVSA, has been plagued by accidents and oil spills in recent years, which critics say are the result of poor management.

On Saturday, television images showed dark smoke billowing from the refinery, and photographs taken earlier showed a huge mass of flames leaping into the night sky. The fires continued to burn on Saturday night, but officials said they were under control.

Venezuela is a major oil supplier to the United States. Mr. Ramírez said that the explosion occurred in a storage area near the edge of the vast compound and did not damage the main processing area, so he expected work at the refinery would resume within two days.

Vice President Elías Jaua said 39 people had been killed, including 18 members of the National Guard, who maintain a post at the site that was heavily damaged. He said 15 of the victims were civilians, many of them family members of the National Guard soldiers and were staying at the guardsmen’s compound. Six of the bodies had not been identified, he said.

Officials said a 10-year-old boy was among the dead. Many area homes were evacuated.

President Hugo Chávez called the accident “sad and painful” and declared a national mourning period of three days.

“We don’t have anything to hide,” Mr. Chávez said, vowing to investigate the accident. “We have to overcome this tragedy.”

The Amuay refinery is part of the Paraguaná refinery complex, one of the largest in the world. The complex can process about 900,000 barrels of crude oil a day.

In 2010 there was a large fire at a PDVSA fuel terminal on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. The same year, a fire on a dock at Paraguaná interrupted fuel shipments. Also in 2010, a natural gas exploration rig, the Aban Pearl, sank in the Caribbean.

José Bodas, an oil union leader, said that the company had failed to invest in maintenance. “This has as a consequence the increase in accidents and tragic deaths like what we are seeing today,” he said in a telephone call to Globovision, a television channel associated with the political opposition to President Chávez.