Thursday, June 28, 1984 dawned in Buenos Aires as the coldest day of the year, with no one imagining that the night would turn into hell. The minimum temperature had exceeded one degree below zero in the city and the media reported that there was a gas shortage and that During the night five people had died from the cold. The economic crisis inherited from the dictatorship hit hard and President Raúl Alfonsín called for an exceptional effort to confront it, at the same time that he negotiated an agreement for coordination with the four general secretaries of the CGT and the Ministry of Economy announced that 280 million dollars of interest on the foreign debt would be paid.
The day passed without any other relevant events. On the other side of the Riachuelo, in the Dock Sud Petrochemical Polewhere more than a dozen companies in that sector were concentrated, the workers completed their shifts, while the residents of the nearest settlement, named not without reason Flammable Villawere preparing to spend another freezing night in their icy huts. Docked in the port of Dock Sud, The tanker “Perito Moreno”, from the YPF fleetwas unloading fuel.
Hell broke loose at exactly 8:15 p.m., when A tremendous explosion shook the ground of a large part of Avellaneda and the southern area of the City of Buenos Aires. In the “docke” – as the neighbors call Dock Sud – the houses shook, the glass windows exploded and a general blackout left everything in darkness. In the first moment of surprise, stupor and fear, no one knew what had happened.
Argentina’s fragile democracy had been in place for just over seven months and Alfonsín’s government was navigating difficult waters due to pressure from sectors of the Armed Forces that did not want its members to be tried for crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship. That’s why, Many thought it was an attack carried out with a bomb of tremendous power.
Stunned, terrified and without access to the media, the residents of Dock Sud and Villa Inflamable took a while to learn that It was not a bomb but the explosion of the “Perito Moreno” while unloading its cargo at the port, with the tragedy of three crew members dead and six missing. Only four people on board survived, as they jumped into the dark waters and swam to shore. It took firefighters eleven days to put out the fire.
The tanker “Perito Moreno”, 172 meters long and with 21 tanks with a capacity of 25,386 cubic meters of fuel, had been operating for the YPF fleet since it was launched in 1966 by Astano Astilleros y Talleres del Noroeste SA, in El Ferrol, Spain. It was initially named “Hipólito Yrigoyen”, in honor of the former radical president, but the dictatorship that began that same year did not take long to change its name to that of the controversial naturalist and explorer of southern Argentina.
On June 28, 1984, it docked at the port of Dock Sud with a load of 13,000 cubic meters of fuel, By 20.15, the ship had unloaded 10,000 and had the remaining 3,000 in its tanks. With a crew of 41 men at sea, there were only 13 people on board at the time, who were responsible for the unloading task. This prevented many more casualties.
The explosion split the ship practically in two.Within minutes the flames had risen to a height of about two hundred metres. Three of the crew died on board the boat and the bodies of six others were never found.
The ship was burning in its middle part, which increased the danger of a new explosion, because nearby was tank number six still loaded with 3,000 cubic meters of crude oil. It was not the only risk, because if the flames spread to the Petrochemical Pole, where there were also oil and gas tanks, it could cause an explosion dozens of times larger. to the point of blowing up not only the entire industrial sector but the entirety of Villa Inflamable and the Dock Sud.
For that reason, in addition to trying to contain the fire, The firefighters began to throw water into the nearest tanks within the Petrochemical Pole. “It was scary, because everything could have exploded. It was a very complicated incident due to the characteristics of the area, where there were many refineries. And some petrochemicals. The danger was that the high temperatures would cause some of the tanks of the companies that were attached to the dock to explode and cause a domino effect,” he later explained. Daniel Blanco, from the Dock Sud Volunteer Firefightersthe first to arrive at the place.
Shortly afterwards, the Prefectura Firefighters joined in, and later units from Barracas, La Boca, Avellaneda, Wilde, Lanús, Echenagucia and the Federal Police.
Access for fire engines and ambulances became very difficult, because The fire had raised the temperature to hundreds of meters around the boatIt was not until the day after the explosion that the firefighters were able to board the ship to attack the source of the fire head-on, but the explosions that occurred inside the hull increased the fire in the stern section and forced them to withdraw again.
These were the first difficult skirmishes in a fight against the flames that would last for a week and a half.
On the night of the explosion, Juan Jugovik was behind the counter of his warehouse in Dock Sud. “I was serving a neighbor who came to buy cold cuts when the ship exploded. The explosion broke the windows of the premises and everything shook suddenly, we were very scared. At first I thought it was a house where a jug had exploded, we went deaf. Then I found out about the YPF boat and I ran out to see what was happening at the Polo. After that I left Dock Sud. I had lived there for 37 years, but I realized that it was a time bomb,” he told students from the University of Avellaneda who wanted to reconstruct the events of those days in popular memory.
“I lived in a building in Las Torres del ‘docke’ and I thought it was a bomb. The building shook and all the glass broke. People came shooting out of the apartments and we bumped into each other on the stairs. We couldn’t see anything because the power went out. All of Avellaneda shook“Literally, everything, I remember well. When I got to the street it was all dark and in the distance we could see the flames that lit up, lit up everything,” Beatriz García, a resident of Dock Sud, recounted years later.
Firefighter Daniel Blanco will never forget those days. One of his first tasks was to open the valves of a Union Carbide bunker. He was doing that when the second explosion occurred at the “Perito Moreno”. “As soon as we arrived, we wanted to open some valves, which we already knew about, to cool the Union Carbide tanks. Then the second explosion occurred. A colleague, Daniel Villa, told me that I jumped I don’t know how many meters by reflex. Today I sometimes look at the distance from the floor to the ceiling of that bunker and it is impossible that in a normal state I jumped as far as I did to land on the other side. In those moments you only think about saving your life. We lay there, face down, not deciding what to do because we could still hear a very loud sound in our ears, we were deaf. The truth is that I thought it wouldn’t come out of that.”he said.
In the media of the time, one can read matching testimonies from neighbours who were interviewed the day after the explosion. The most repeated ones are: “In my house the walls were shaking and the furniture was flying” and “It seemed like an earthquake”.
The day after the explosion, when the ship’s fire was far from being completely controlled, President Raúl Alfonsín visited the disaster area. He did it against the recommendations of his collaborators and the Federal Police firefighters, who warned him about the danger of new explosions in the “Perito Moreno” or, much worse, in the Petrochemical Pole.
After a few initial days of progress and setbacks, Firefighters were able to control the fire first, the last outbreak of which was extinguished on July 9.. “It was really a fire that was very difficult to keep under control, not to extinguish it but to keep it in its course, because although the ship was split in half, it was not sunk and then, with the variations of the tides, it swayed to the port or starboard side and the fire ran there. In a short time, fire crews from all the barracks arrived and The oil company YPF gave us the foam we needed to control the fire.to control it from just expanding, not to extinguish it. At that time we did not have the more sophisticated equipment that exists today, which could have done everything much faster. We were like this for eleven days and nights,” said firefighter Blanco.
After the fire was extinguished, traces of the disaster were still visible throughout the surrounding area. In Dock Sud and Villa Inflamable, the fallen walls multiplied, the windows shattered, doors torn from their frames and a climate of fear that would not dissipate for a long time.
Shortly after, the neighbors began to organize and demand more controls over the Petrochemical Pole, while demanding that the effects of the operation of the petrochemical plants on the environment and the local inhabitants be investigated. Also A move was launched to eradicate polluting companies, but it had very little effect.
40 years after the explosion of the “Perito Moreno”, Near the dock where it caught fire there are still some remains of the ship scattered as mute testimony of a disaster that put hundreds of thousands of people in danger of death.
