Photo: Giron Newspaper

With the placement of the first steel plates, the assembly at the bottom of tank 88 began in the industrial zone of Matanzas, the first of the four planned to be built as part of the recovery of the Supertankers Base, burned in 2022.

As reported today by the newspaper Granma, it is the union of each plate by means of a rigorous welding, in charge of the workers of the Oil Maintenance Company (Empet), and is done after fixing the foundation of the floor, including the irrigation of an asphalt layer, to leave ready the base of this deposit of 61 meters in diameter.

Engineer Rigel Rodríguez, director of the Territorial Fuel Marketing Division, explained that the new tank, whose construction should be completed in April 2024, will also have an internal floating aluminum membrane and a geodesic dome, and will store 50,000 cubic meters of fuel.

For the recovery of the area, the construction plan includes in general 14 objects of works, including a road in the southern area of the burned tanks, a kind of dam located above the buckets, which will act as a retaining wall in case of spillage, and projects to guarantee a stable supply of water to the installation and to face any incident.

The executive said that they are working on the automated fire system, for which they have a donation of 250,000 dollars from the Vietnamese Government.

In addition, he said, new proposals for lightning rod systems are in the approval phase, and work is accelerating for the connection of tanks still in disuse.

He insisted that the distance between the tanks will be greater than before, according to the current international standard: in the space where those four tanks were, now only two will be placed.

Another substantial change will have to do with the buckets, which will contain 1.5 times the capacity of the tank, and will be armed with earth lined with concrete, a quality that prevents the collapse of that structure if it is rammed by fire and oil spill.

(Taken from ACN)