“It was the chronicle of a death foretold,” says a Bauxilum worker about what happened at the EP-45-102 calciner, which exploded on the night of November 25th at the basic company, located in Ciudad Guayana, Bolivar State, in the south of the country.
By: Pableysa Ostos | Correspondent lapatilla.1eye.us
The employee, who for security reasons preferred to keep his name anonymous, explained that there were four working calciners in the works: 1, 2, 101 and 102. The first three had already been idled for some time, and the only one in operation was the one that exploded last night.
“The calciner has been presenting problems for more than a year, the refractory, hot spots and all its needed spare parts, the lance, the chute (spout), all the spare parts that were needed for that. They hired the contractor Productos Industriales Resentados C.A (Pirca), which is a maintenance company, so to speak, also specialized in refractory and that type of thing,” explained the worker of the state company.
When the contracting started a couple of weeks ago, they brought in about 80 workers to carry out the maintenance, but they gradually started removing these workers “because there were no resources to do the work. The calciner was never stopped under the recommendations from Pirca and the recommendations from Autolumbre itself. The resources that have to do with refractory and other types of reinforcement, packing, joints and things like that did not arrive.”
“Forewarned is forearmed”
It transpired that “they held a meeting with the presidency and the technical heads of operations and recorded their videos, recorded their things and recommended that the calciner be stopped last week. But the board said that it could not be stopped, because they needed to guarantee alumina, the little bit of alumina that they were producing.”
“The last time the other calciner, 101, exploded, they also said it was sabotage and we know that this is false. This time there were no injuries, but the previous time there were, when the calciner exploded. There were injuries and burns with aluminum.”
“Inside that calciner, high temperatures are handled, close to 1,000 and 800 degrees Celsius. If you have gas inside the unit, you have a fire, a fire as such,” he explained.
At the time of the explosion, there were about six workers at the site: the calciner operators and the operators of the plant area.
On the morning of Tuesday, November 26th, officials from the Bolivian National Guard (GNB) and the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin) were present at the site.