Pemex reported the deaths of 314 COVID-19 workers and seven contractors; their platforms pose a threat to that of crowded cruise ships or bars.
Tomus Morales Vega shuddered and huddled with his colleagues in a narrow corridor in front of the doctor’s office, they knew they would wait a while, there was only one doctor at the Pol-A platform remedy center, one of nearly 240 in the Gulf of Mexico operating platforms and other structures through Petreles Mexicanos, or Pemex, Mexico’s state oil company. Outside, the wind whipped the platform and the waves collided with its imposing metal legs.
Morales, a 62-year-old mechanical integrity engineer, had been feeling unwell for days, but when he nevertheless saw the doctor, he was told to return to his bunk; there were many other people who were sicker than him. He kept working. He had his food in a poorly ventilated dining room with up to a hundred other people. He shared 15 square meters of living area with 3 men as he tried to forget about his worsening dizziness, fever and headaches.
When a helicopter picked him up on April 16, the sky buzzed with air ambulances evacuating patients from platforms and near Pemex flotal, a floating hotel that can only accommodate 700 workers. “There were many other people inflamed, Morales says, “Doctors may not take other people off the platforms temporarily enough. “
Pemex reported the deaths of 314 COVID-19 workers and seven contractors; this is just more than all the other primary oil corporations in the combined world; it is also the largest number of corporations in the world.
Ground Zero are the platforms: on August 13, 36 of the 7,500 employees on the Pemex platform had died of COVID-19, that these staff were more than twice as likely as the rest of Pemex’s staff to die from the disease and 10 times more. most likely the average Mexican citizen.
And while its policies and procedures are now stricter, Pemex still suffers from primary epidemics. In August, a huge floating Pemex garage and oil processing plant off the coast of Campeche state stopped operations for six days due to an outbreak.
And yet Pemex continues to pump, despite the collapse in oil costs in March and April, and defying a global trend in which the oil and fuel industry is expected to cut $100 billion ($137 billion) in exploration and production. according to consulting firm Rystad Energy.
Pemex is a key source of government profit and national pride, a drop in production can have political consequences for Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, who has placed Pemex at the center of his plans versus 3 decades of what he calls neoliberal economic policy.
Morales on Paseo de los Angeles Reforma in Mexico City after his recovery.
He blames the pro-market agendas of his predecessors, adding the 2014 reforms that ended Pemex’s monopoly and opened the electricity sector to foreign investment, weakening Pemex and, the election campaign, destroying Mexico’s oil wealth. In December 2018, AMLO pledged to counteract the decline in Pemex production and make the country’s power self-sufficient.
On April 13, Pemex said it had implemented an emergency plan to combat COVID-19 on marine platforms. Workers on these platforms say the company has been slow to disinfect paints and living spaces, reduce staff, evacuate in poor-health paints and supply COVID. 19 diagnostic tests before boarding.
Evacuations were slow because doctors had to ask their bosses for permission at hospitals and regional offices run by Pemex to send other people home, leaving other people with other contagious people who continued to run close to each other for days afterward. to report symptoms. A dozen Pemex employees, as well as former employees, members of the family circle and a lawyer representing the employees, recommend that situations have gone ahead in some options and not in others.
Like Mexico’s global population, Pemex’s workforce has the highest rates of others with diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, situations that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19 afflictions. a population of approximately 750,000 people eligible for Pemex’s fitness benefits, adding 126,274 employees, members of the family circle and retirees. Like much of Mexico’s public fitness system, care at Pemex hospitals is patchy, with some ill-equipped amenities to cope with the large influx of patients inflamed by the virus.
Pemex executive Chairman Octavio Romero Oropeza paid deceased workers three times in visits to oil fields and facilities, but said nothing publicly about the toll that distinguishes Pemex. had immediately reported on the measures it had implemented to combat the virus and had no additional comments.
Andrés Oliva, spokesman for the Mexican Petroleum Workers’ Union, which represents more than 75% of Pemex’s employees, said in response to questions emailed that remediation strategies on Pemex platforms “were followed in accordance with Mexico’s General Health standards. Advice. ” He indicated that the union, known by its Spanish acronym STPRM, had requested Pemex to “comply with its collective labour agreement and the standards established through the Ministry of Health and the General Health Council”.
At best, Pemex’s reaction to the virus has been uneven, on March 18 the corporation announced protection and remediation measures to the maximum of its ground facilities, adding refineries and petrochemical plants, workers had to use antibacterial gel and mask and had their temperature. monitored daily; social esttachment was imposed and offices and factories were rehabilitated.
But on platforms, where social estating is virtually impossible, Pemex absolutely did not disinfect or decrease the number until May, according to five employees of the Pemex platform. Also that month, the corporation began conducting immediate diagnostic tests on others to address the platforms. according to the workers, however, those who leave the platforms and disperse in all regions of Mexico are not yet tested.
Oscar Ortiz, an herbal fuel analytical tester on the Abkaton-Delta platform, says that before boarding march 30, he filled out a symptom questionnaire and had his temperature checked. That’s the scope of Pemex’s security protocols, he said. months, there were a number of outbreaks on the platform and at least four other people died from the virus, Ortiz said. “The security measures were not implemented on time and were not the right ones,” he says. feel powerless because those lives may have been saved. “
Eduardo Fernando Marón Castillo bought two seats to accommodate his great on the crowded STPRM bus that took him snarling for 20 hours from his home in Tampico in Ciudad del Carmen. helicopters about a hundred kilometers from the platforms in the Gulf.
As the coronavirus spread in April, Castillo began to think he would stay away from platforms, where he worked 14 consecutive days each month, and buses due to obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes, but he, his wife and his teenage son. It depended on his salary as a maintenance mechanic, who paid about 315,000 pesos, or $20,400 a year.
Although Mexico announced its first instances of COVID-19 on February 28, Pemex has not yet tested staff for the virus before boarding in April, according to staff from five separate platforms. On April 30, when Castillo returned to the Balam-Alfa platform, Pemex reported the virus-related deaths of seven employees and a contractor.
The tight, interconnected spaces of an offshore platform offer the virus a potentially dangerous infection matrix such as a cruise ship or a crowded bar. A Pemex platform usually accommodates two hundred to three hundred employees and subcontractors who eat and sleep in combination on board There is a hierarchy in living conditions: according to supervisors and coordinators sleep one or two according to the room, and engineers and technicians sleep in rooms of four. Staff at the lower point sleep six according to the room and use a non-unusual bathroom. the other people housed on the platform, the managers arrive by air to tour the various amenities on the water, just like the hired maintenance staff.
When Castillo approached the Balam-Alfa platform in late April, he did not discover a systematic implementation of anti-virus measures, explains his partner, Isabel Robledo Segura, who improvised his own preventive measures and proceeded to interact with groups that did not. Wear mask or disinfect regularly. After another long bus ride in mid-May, he made the decision to apply for a paid license under clause 43 of the STPRM union contract with Pemex.
The clause states that painters who cannot move to paintings due to an herbal crisis or other excessive scenario may receive a payment until they can return safely. As COVID-19 instances increased, many Pemex painters began to apply in segment 43. painted for Pemex for 23 years as a “temporary” painter, a painter who actually has a permanent position but does not have a long-term contract. He was told that he deserved to queu the painters fully and that he might have to use holidays, Segura said.
It is not known when and where Castillo was exposed to the coronavirus, on May 25 he took another bus to Ciudad del Carmen to fill out the documents in the user he mistakenly thought he needed, to his home in June when he began expanding symptoms of COVID-19. At that time, Pemex granted him paid leave. He died on June 27, over the age of 50.
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as AMLO, has placed Pemex at the center of his economic policy.
“Sometimes I collapse, cry and cry,” says Segura, her voice dissofiing in tears. “He told me he was afraid. As of August 13, Rodolfo Lehmann Mendoza, Pemex’s deputy director of fitness services, said the corporate had granted a deadline of 43 leave about 8,500 employees, or about 7% of the workforce.
Sergio Castellanos, a 56-year-old Pemex platform engineer with maximum blood pressure, was on vacation in May when he asked for a brief extension to cover the end of his planned period on the Abkation-Alfa platform. after seeing that Pemex was not implementing sanitation or security protocols, its stay on the platform in March and April, he said.
“For just a few days of work, why don’t you let me through and give me a chance to get infected?”Question. Managers “are in the office, and because they are a little more isolated, they don’t realize how bad it is on the platforms. “
His application was denied and he painted on 19 and 20 May, the remaining days of his designated paintings consistent with the period of the month. On May 21, he left the platform and returned home to Minatitlón, Veracruz. Within a few days it began to expand, sore throats, pains, headaches, fatigue and loss of appetite. On June 1, he entered a hospital in Pemex. Su the point of oxygen saturation had fallen to a dangerously low level of 78, consistent with a hundred.
“My teeth were shaking so much that I couldn’t close my mouth,” he said. He refused to allow doctors to intubate him because he thought he was going to die. Provided with oxygen, he recovered and was released on June 12. On July 2, he returned to the platforms.
Pemex is in a worse monetary position than almost any other oil company in the world, with a debt of $107 billion ($146. 6 billion), struggled to cope with a heavy tax burden, an inflated labor force, heavy pension obligations and a refining company that wasting money (despite all the oil it pumps , Pemex imports 65% of the gasoline it sells).
Over the decades, it has made no investments in the discovery of new oil fields to update depleted mature deposits. After declining for 15 consecutive years, its oil production is part of its peak in 2004. Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings lowered Pemex’s rating in April, pushing their bonds further into junk territory. S
For decades, Pemex has been consistent with the Mexican government as a coin cow. Where his foreign peers continually invest coins to locate more crude, Pemex brings much of his profits to the Treasury. Taxes, royalties and other oil revenues account for nearly 10% of the federal budget. AMLO’s desire to increase the company’s daily crude oil production to 2. 4 million barrels until the end of its term in 2024 may be simply ambitious, given that July production is 1. 6 million barrels consistent with the day, the lowest volume of crude oil. pumped since October 1979. It is also unclear whether or when global demand will recover.
Oil rig staff are a must for AMLO’s hopes. On May 1, Pemex announced that it had evacuated some 3,100 employees on the high seas, halting the density of the platforms. The company insisted that everyone who produces oil would stay there. “It should be noted that the withdrawal of personnel is aimed at purposes that are not essential and that are not the operation of offshore oil facilities,” Pemex said in a statement.
Asked on June 3 about COVID-19 outbreaks at the facility and platforms in front of Campeche, AMLO said “nothing has been late”. More recently, however, he said epidemics on platforms were beginning to occur. “We also had difficulties because of COVID because we had patients on oil rigs, on ships,” he said at his daily morning press convention on September 7. “We processed them and production stopped. “
As staff get sick, those who are healthy have even more pressure to keep pumping. “The platform’s activities can’t be stopped overnight because we have production commitments,” says Morales, the pol-A platform engineer. the other people in it tell us. And, of course, the president, the Department of Energy, needs production nationwide.
After Morales was evacuated from Pol-A in mid-April, doctors at a Pemex hospital in Ciudad del Carmen discharged him with a diagnosis of laryngitis and told him to isolate himself in a nearby hotel that he, not Pemex, would pay. , took the next bus to Paraso, where his family circle has a house. He waited at the crowded bus station for 3 hours, then drove another 3 hours to Paraso “glued” to the other passengers on a crowded bus, His wife, daughter, son and chihuahua mascot, Mollete Federico I, named after the main dish of Mexican breakfast, left Mexico City to meet him.
A week later, Morales’ headache, fever, loss of appetite, and dizziness became so severe that his son took him to a hospital near Pemex, and as the hospital could not accommodate COVID-19 patients , an ambulance took him to some other Pemex establishment in Villahermosa. This hospital had enough drinking water only for doctors and nurses, not for patients, and the bathroom in Morales’ room had no soap or tissues; her circle of relatives had to buy her water and toiletries. Conditioning doesn’t work, so Morales was sweating with a 38. 9-degree fever in the tropical heat of southern Mexico. “I felt like an abandoned puppy,” he said.
He did the first test of the virus on April 24, the day he was hospitalized, the result was positive again 3 days later, came out on May 1 and May 19 came back negative. He returned to the paintings on the Pol-A platform in June. five when he sent an email to Pemex’s human resources branch requesting exemption from The Paintings of Term 43, mentioning his age and maximum blood pressure. He never won an answer, he said.
Section 43 has become a challenge for many Pemex staff members and for some to be a source of discontent with their union. Jaqueline Roxana Izaguirre Godinez, an employee of the Salina Cruz refinery in the state of Oaxaca, reports that the union “negotiates” with staff on Article 43 programs rather than arguing their instances with the company. It also states that the union provides safe preferential remedy staff with respect to segment 43 programmes.
Ernesto Cavazos Soto, a platform worker, made a motion to combat what he sees as an injustice to the union and blames the union for not making sure Pemex helps keep vulnerable personnel off the platforms and sanitation facilities. Izaguirre are members of the Soto movement, known as Fusion Active Partners of the Oil Community, or Fusion of members of the oil community.
Production by the state oil company has been at some of its lowest levels since the 1970s; the federal government relies on its income of 10 percent of its annual budget.
Oliva, a spokesman for the STPRM, denied that the union deterred Pemex’s staff from seeking clause 43 or given preferential remedy to some trade unionists. “It would be absurd to oppose compliance with a clause that was negotiated in the collective agreement for all staff. ,” he wrote.
Some staff members who did not discharge the exemptions from the 43rd company term have sought injunctive action in federal and state courts, arguing that they are entitled to exemptions under the Department of Health’s March 31 contractual clause or order Mexicans who are most at risk of severe COVID -19 paint headaches remain at home. The ministry order expired at the end of July, making it difficult for Pemex staff to obtain or maintain a paid license.
A collective of lawyers known as COVID Justice, or COVID Justice, has provided loose legal information to more than a hundred vulnerable Pemex employees. Emmanuel Quiroz, the group’s lawyer, says some clients are suffering to described himself as vulnerable because the company has not. kept his medical records up to date. ” Pemex is required, under its collective agreement, to conduct medical examinations once a year, but in some establishments staff have not been examined for years,” she says. it can be difficult to know if they are in situations that would put them at risk.
There were a lot of other people inflamed. Doctors should not take other people off the platforms temporarily.
– Mechanical Engineer Tomus Morales Vega
Morales hired his own attorney and filed a court order after Pemex failed to comply with his Section 43 waiver statement. After completing his 14-day stay on the Pol-A platform in June, he received a court order allowing him to stay off the platform from June 26 to July 31.
As the pandemic rises and goes down in Mexico and the world, it is a constant presence in Pemex, which infiltrated the company’s ground facilities, adding a refinery in Cadereyta, at least 4 Cadereyta workers died, adding two of the refinery’s processing units, one in sales and one nurse at Pemex regional hospital , according to 3 Pemex workers at the refinery who requested anonymity.
The contagion began with maintenance paintings in a unit that concerned two hundred painters, an aggregate of Pemex painters and subcontractors who ran from appearance to appearance, many without masks, the 3 painters say. installation without wearing down the fitness controls.
In Salina Cruz, Mexico’s largest refinery, Izaguirre says Pemex did not impose social estating or mask supply on all staff in April and May. There’s no soap in the toilets or antibacterial gel, he said. mandatory appliances and appliances to protect us,” he says. I bought my own mask, latex gloves and a disinfectant gel because I was afraid to inflame and infect my children. “
The jewel of AMLO’s crusade to rejuvenate Pemex is a new $8 billion refinery in Tabasco state, where the president of Mexico was born, once the structure is completed, the refinery will have the capacity to process 340,000 consistent barrels a day, making it the largest in AMLO says the refinery will be consistent with Mexico to avoid the burden of gasoline. Critics say the allocation diverts attention from the main drilling activity and suggests that Pemex’s six existing plants are incompatible with one-third of its capacity.
However, a video posted through Dutch company Van Oord, a subcontractor of the project, shows that corporations are constantly running to complete the refinery until AMLO’s 2023 deadline. Off site, many local citizens crowd without mask or social esttachment, hoping to land one of 20,000 structure jobs promised through AMLO, according to Mexican news site Animal Polotico. AMLO Energy Minister Roco Nahle, who tweets photos and videos of the site, recently tested positive for COVID-19.
Approximately 48,000 painters of Pemex house paintings. This summer, the company completed a house painting order until the end of the year, while creating stricter rules for painters who hoped to qualify as “vulnerable” and eligible for a paid leave. According to an internal Pemex document of July 27, painters will have to be 65 years or older to be considered as the main threat due to their age: five years more than the minimum age established by the Mexican Ministry of Health.
For others with diabetes or high blood pressure, in addition to the needs of the Ministry of Health, such as higher level 2 blood pressure, they may have gone through a primary medical emergency such as a center attack or stroke. The Pemex representative stated that doctors would compare each patient separately and use the criteria as a consultant as a requirement.
On 1 August, Morales returned to work, arrived at dos Bocas port in Tabasco and joined 10 other men in orange monkeys waiting in a helipad with clear skies, grimly joking about his imprisonment in prisons at sea, on death row.
After undergoing immediate coronavirus diagnostic tests, they flew 120 kilometers to sea platforms. Morales said he didn’t feel the panic that took hold of him on his last platform vacation, but was certain that at home, his wife, the youth and Mollete the Chihuahuas were worried about him. “My wife thinks of the worst. But I’m optimistic,” he said. “We are in God’s hands. “
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