Explosion this Sunday night in Matanzas. Photo: @SantanaMiriel/ Twitter
✒ Ricardo Ronquillo Bello
Rarely has a deposit meant so much to the hope of a city. Those of us who share these hours with the people from Matanzas felt that the salvation of tank three, in the industrial zone of the city, for hours and hours resisting the breakdown despite the flames and heat that sprouted from tank two, would mean the first great triumphant game about an incident that has the country in suspense since Friday nightfall.
That encouragement had been reinforced by a message on networks, in the middle of the afternoon this Sunday, from Suselys Morfa, the main territorial political leader, who arouses so much sympathy for her leadership in these hard days.
There were not a few who from the four corners of the City of Bridges followed the force of the flames and the direction of the dense and dark column of smoke with the secret interest of not seeing the same noise repeated on the horizonfollowed by a mushroom of fire and an acid, hot and blinding glow that has already shocked them twice before.
A tour of the busy and tense industrial zone, at the edge of eight o’clock at night, took away the strength of optimism. While the Cubans responsible for confronting this crisis insisted on accelerating the measures to stop the incident, together with supportive personnel from Mexico and Venezuela, the tension rose in the environment with the same intensity that you called them and the imposing column of smoke.
A strong air fueled the fire of tank two, at sunset, on the dome of tank three and it was already speculated that it was giving way in some of its parts.
A brief stay at the specialized fire station closest to the fire, which had become a kind of general staff and a place of rest and relief for these combatants, increased the alarm.
Nevertheless, the threat seemed to dissipate around nine o’clock at night. The appearance of a strong storm, with a change in the direction of the winds, which ended in a calm in which not even the leaves moved, put the flames and the smoking column towards the skymoving them away from the already fragile dome of tank three by that time.
The terrifying mushroom of fire that would be repeated about two hours later, at the edge of dawn, would be the definitive lesson that in the face of accidents of this nature and magnitude, not only good wishes are enough.
The people of Matanzas and the country seem to be facing, from the moment that third disheartening fungus of fire and explosion was unleashed, what would seem to be the most compromising and challenging phase of this accident.
Photo of the moment of the Explosion in #Massacres pic.twitter.com/QbFXJLYWqy
– Miriel Santana (@SantanaMiriel) August 8, 2022