On April 1, a Pemex Oil refinery platform in Mexico City caught fire. 302 coworkers were evacuated from the area. Forty-five people were treated for injuries, sixteen of which required hospitalization and two of those which were considered serious injuries. Four people died in this fire. The cause of the fire has yet to be determined, but Pemex has said that there was no oil spill caused by the disaster. This fire is an environmental concern for several reasons. The first of which being that refinery fires are a major pollutant to the air that we breathe. Fires release copious amounts of smoke and carbon dioxide into the air, and with this being a fire in an oil refinery, there are also other chemicals being released into the air that need to be considered. This is not the only incident that Pemex has had in recent years. Disasters like this are a recurring concept for this company. A company spokesman seemed to show little concern for the business or for the workers, stating that "impact on production would be small because other processing sights near by would pick up the slack." Private investors are now flocking to the Pemex oil company to buy them out in an attempt to reduce the oil monopoly, reduce oil taxes, and prevent more incidents like this from occurring.
While oil refineries are essential to our way of life as humans, they are also a very big problem. They pollute the air on a regular basis, and they are prone to disasters like these. When fires and explosions happen at these refineries, there is an immediate danger to the employees of the refinery and a long-term consequence to the environment. Safety precautions should be increased. The cause of these fires and explosions should be determined and prevented in the future. People are dying in these fires and the state of our planet is suffering as well.
Sara Idol
April 3, 2015
10:11 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/01/pemex-oil-platform-fire_n_6986756.html?utm_hp_ref=green
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