Two workers died and another suffered burns in an explosion and fire Saturday at Pemex’s Salina Cruz oil refinery on the Oaxaca coast.
The early-afternoon conflagration — which caused much concern among residents in the Oaxaca port city — occurred after heavy rainfall caused drains filled with oily waste to overflow onto walkways inside the complex, plant manager Arturo Recio Espinoza told reporters on Monday.
For more than 24 hours after the fire, officials with Pemex, Mexico’s state oil company, denied that there had been any deaths, but on Monday, Recio admitted that Mariana Sánchez Bailón, 21, and Erick Martínez Rodríguez, 26, both lost their lives.
The injured person, who was hospitalized with burns on various parts of his body, was identified as Julián Meléndez Martínez, 25.
According to the online news outlet Oaxaca Político, Sánchez was an administrative employee and Martínez was an engineer. Sánchez died while sitting in the back of a pickup truck parked in the complex and Martínez was located near the truck when the explosion happened, the news outlet reported. According to various media sources, Sanchez’s body was desiccated by the intense heat of the explosion.
Recio said the incident led to a “temporary halt” in operations at the facility’s main distillation and gasoline plants but that no other units were affected.
The oil refinery, one of Mexico’s largest, has a crude oil processing capacity of 330,000 barrels per day, according to Reuters. On Monday, however, it was operating at approximately 70% of capacity.
Recio also revealed that the plant’s cleanup-and-repair operation included a pumping procedure that sent sludge onto La Ventosa Beach, about 5 kilometers away. Refinery personnel were hurriedly cleaning up that spill, he added.
The Pemex plant manager also explained that “atypical” rains caused the refinery’s internal drainage and storm management system — which handles industrial waste such as oil and gasoline — to overflow. When the slurry rose to the surface and came into contact with a spark or flame, it caused an explosion and the fire, he said.
“We are in the initial stages of investigation and interviews to establish the root cause of where the fire started,” Recio said Monday.
He also noted that the deceased worked for Eseasa and Pesado, a transport company subcontracted by ICA Fluor, a company responsible for engineering, procurement and construction at the oil refinery. According to El Universal, ICA Fluor is under contract with Pemex to build a coking plant at the Salina Cruz refinery.
Meanwhile, the newspaper El Universal reported that fishermen and oil workers in the area blamed the fire — and the “constant spills that contaminate La Ventosa Bay” — on the refinery’s obsolete sewage and wastewater treatment systems.
These sources told El Universal said that the systems haven’t been operating for at least 10 years, which causes oil and gasoline waste to go untreated. Instead, they said, the industrial waste goes straight into a drainage system that discharges into La Ventosa Bay.
Three months ago, a spill of oily waste covered the beach and flooded its fishing and oyster area, the newspaper reported.
“We are tired,” said fishermen and oyster extractors as quoted by El Universal. “We are going to make decisions in the next few days to show the oil company that it cannot contaminate with impunity.”
Though usually called the Salina Cruz refinery, the Pemex plant is officially named the Antonio Dovalí Jaime refinery in tribute to a late civil engineer from Zacatecas.
This was not the first Pemex oil refinery in 2024 to experience an explosion: in February, state Civil Protection officials in Hidalgo, reported an explosion at Pemex’s Tula refinery — the nation’s most productive — that they said occurred inside its hydrodesulfurization plant, where the sulfur is removed from refined petroleum products using a high-pressure process.
With reports from Proceso, El Universal and Reuters
