Cuba progresses in recovery work at power plant affected by accident

MATANZAS, Cuba, Apr 11 (ACN) The extraction of the soot that still remains inside the chimney and the cleaning of the area around that sector, stand out today among the main recovery tasks at the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Plant (CTE by its Spanish acronym), after the accident that occurred last Friday.

In exclusive statements to the Cuban News Agency, Misbel Palmero Aguilar, director of the CTE, explained that a brigade of the Specialized Construction and Assembly Company (ECME by its Spanish acronym) is working in the area, where a partition wall collapsed, causing the death of two workers.

The work schedule to solve the damages to the structure is still being studied, but we have the material and human resources to carry out the task, which should not exceed the time assigned for the maintenance of the block, foreseen until late May, confirmed the engineer.

Palmero Aguilar ratified that the constructive actions will include, basically, the raising of the demolished side walls to facilitate the extraction of the fourth worker buried by the debris, while the feasibility of building a new partition inside the chimney is being studied.

On the previous Friday afternoon, after the collapse of the seven-meter-high dividing wall, four workers of ECME were buried in the lower part of the chimney. Two of them were rescued shortly afterwards and treated at the provincial hospital Comandante Faustino Perez, in this city, in addition to a third one who helped in the rescue.

Unfortunately, despite the uninterrupted rescue work, which lasted almost 30 hours, Alexis Bernardo Labrada Junco and Lazaro Montero Pita died in the incident.

With more than three decades since its foundation, CTE Guiteras stands out among its peers for being located in the west of the country, where the largest cargoes are concentrated, and for consuming domestic crude by pipeline, without the need for transportation costs, among other advantages.