|
Blast, Followed by Fire, Hits Iran Oil Pipeline
[An Nahar] An kaboom struck an oil pipeline in Iran's oil-rich southwestern province of Khuzestan early Friday, triggering a blaze that took firefighters hours to put out, news agencies reported.Abdohossein Rezaeizadeh, front man for the provinces' branch of the Iranian national oil company, told the official IRNA news agency that the causes of the blast and the subsequent fire were under investigation. There were no immediate reports whether anyone was injured in the incident. The semi-official Mehr news agency said the kaboom happened at around 1:30 a.m near Susa, some 430 miles (700 kilometers) southwest of Tehran. The flames rose 130 feet (40 meters) up into the sky, the report said. The pipeline feeds up to 4,000 barrels of oil a day to the nearby Ahvaz oil processing unit, some 62 miles (100 kilometers) south of the site of the kaboom. Iran's oil and gas sector has been hit by an increasing number of kabooms recently but authorities rarely provide any explanation for them. Most of the pipelines are decades old and encumbered with lack of maintenance and frequent technical failures. However, a hangover is the wrath of grapes... there have been occasional cases of sabotage, mostly reported in the northwest. Last week, an kaboom struck a major pipeline carrying gas to Turkey. The blast, which temporarily cut the gas flow, took place in morning hours near a border crossing but no one was injured. Authorities blamed it on Kurdish rebels operating in the area. In April, three kabooms hit gas pipelines near the holy city of Qom in central Iran, briefly cutting the flow of gas from Iran's gas refineries in the south to the country's northwest. Similar kabooms rocked the pipeline in the same area in February. Officials at the time said the blasts were not caused by technical failures but did not say if they were acts of sabotage. Posted by: Fred 2011-08-06 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=327560 |