Word: pemex
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...plants are located on the outskirts of cities only to have the sites overrun by bursting populations." Union Carbide officials point out that the Bhopal factory was built in the early 1970s on a site surrounded by unused public land, but a community grew up around it. At the .Pemex plant in Mexico, where an explosion killed at least 452 people last month, a city of shanties developed in the 20 years after the facility was constructed...
Alberto Aquino Hernandez, 28, a truck driver for one of the area's smaller gas companies, had just arrived at the gas-distribution center operated by Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex). "I was counting my cylinders of liquid gas when everything exploded," he said later. "The explosion knocked me off my truck. There was fire everywhere. I started running. My clothes were on fire, my jacket and shirt. My hair was on fire. Somehow I managed to smother the flames, and then a bus stopped and took me to a clinic...
Strangely enough, nobody seemed to know exactly how the explosion in the 18-year-old plant had occurred. Pemex officials first insisted that a fire had started somewhere outside the Pemex facilities, but they equivocated on the details...
...Pemex's safety record is spotty. A 25,000-gal. gasoline-storage tank exploded in the central Mexican city of Tula last January. No one was injured then, but one died and 33 were hurt in another explosion in June in the state of Tabasco. A week later, a pipeline leak in Veracruz intoxicated 16. Inhabitants of San Juan Ixhuatepec claim a fire broke out there last June, but neighborhood protests got nowhere. Pemex Spokesman Salvador del Rio denies this, saying that there were no recent fires and that maintenance was "done continually...
...proposals for new factories near the capital and offer tax incentives for moves elsewhere, but that is clearly not enough. No corporation is eager to move to a remote outpost; until some do, there are no jobs to attract workers. That applies to the government too. "Why does Pemex (the national oil monopoly) have headquarters here when not a single barrel of oil is produced in Mexico City?" asks Pablo Emilio Madero, head of the opposition National Action Party. "The same