By Alejandra Garcia on April 9, 2023 from Havana
Rescuer at the Antonio Guiteras CTE Photo: Raúl Navarro González
The eyes and thoughts of Cuba have been on Matanzas since April 7, when a chimney tower of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric power plant partially collapsed, leaving four people trapped in the rubble. Two of them did not make it out alive. This is the first fatal accident reported in the city after the massive fire of August 5 at the Supertankers base, a few kilometers away from one another.
The world collapsed, according to the workers of the Power Plant and the members of the team of the Specialized Construction Company, who were doing repair work in the Thermoelectric Power Plant that has being working tirelessly day and night to guarantee the supply of energy in a country in crisis.
“That day blackened our spirits, as soot blackened our hands. That day bears a cross on the calendar, and not because it was Good Friday, but because Alexis Labrada, 47, and Lázaro Frank Montero, 57, lost their lives in the rubble, and their bodies were recovered after many hours of rescue work,” Matanzas journalist Guillermo Carmona recounted.
Another part of the tower fell to the ground during rescue efforts. “Bricks fall. All we could heard was the clatter of the falling rocks, the screeching sound of the matted crane, and the engines of the local generator set. The black dust recalls the sad memory of last August. Underneath, everything lost its colors,” Carmona added.
It was a really windy day, with soot blowing from the holes they opened in the walls as they tried to remove everything and save the victims. It looked like it was snowing black, raining dust. The tower was immense. The workers on site remember that, as they looked up, it seemed as if they could not reach the end. After the accident, a great part of its facade was on the ground.
That night of April 7, there was silence. Those who were inside the accident perimeter came out at times as black as soot. They came out to take a breath, pour some water in their faces, breath again. Outside there were hunched faces and people with a lump in their throats. That night and the following Saturday, there was no rest.
rescuers at the Antonio Guiteras plant. photo: acn
“You can’t disguise that fleeting feeling that comes when we have to face the unexpected. But then you look at the anxious firefighters and support personnel that know that the work is not over, that they cannot return home until every last ash is removed while searching for living bodies,” another journalist on the scene, Raúl Navarro, explained on his social networks on Saturday, shortly before the body of the second man had been recovered.
“Suddenly you regain faith in man, in the power of man to move mountains, to get up when the world comes down on you, to push forward. But nothing is torn here, nobody cracks here,” he concluded.
From an armchair in the hospital in Matanzas, builder Ángel Dionis also spoke to the press shortly after being pulled out the rubbles. He described that moment, “as if they were burying you alive, as if you were in a hole and they threw dirt on top of you.” If the tragedy had not occurred, he would have gone to have a few drinks with their co-workers and friends that day, because it was Good Friday, a holiday in Cuba as in so many parts of the world, and because it was also payday.
Matanzas has learned from the low blows of fortune when one afternoon the world rotates on its axis and everything turns upside down. It is still so alive in our memories that lightning that cut the horizon, like torn paper, and then the uncertainty of a giant fire and a smoke that furrowed the sky and filled it with ashes for several days in a row last August.
Cuba once again unites for its dead, and for its anonymous heroes. For all those who lived the tragedy closely, all of those noble workers who help an entire country to recover from the energy crisis that shakes us, from a blockade that suffocates us and leaves our structures vulnerable from the lack of material and parts we need. Once again, Matanzas is not alone.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – US