On the morning of the explosion at the Eni depot in Calenzano, in the province of Florence, on December 9, two separate maintenance interventions were scheduled for the systems. One at shelter number 7 concerned a supply line for loading fuel onto trucks. The other intervention instead concerned two vapor collectors - one smaller, one larger - which had been malfunctioning for some time and are in lane 6, the one of the explosion.
This is what the Prato prosecutor's office has found, which is reconstructing how much the extraordinary maintenance work on the plants, carried out while the fuel loading of the tankers continued, could have influenced the explosion that caused 5 deaths and 26 injuries, as well as significant material damage. Gasoline and other fuel vapors form during the pumping phases of the products into the tankers and a spill is a plausible inconvenience if the recovery plant has a breakdown. At the moment, the Prato prosecutor's office has found that these two interventions were underway.
Eni, however, denied the second maintenance, which according to the company "had not yet started". "This second intervention (by another authorised company) - Eni specifies - was indeed scheduled for execution in the morning, but had not physically started yet and therefore not in progress at the time of the explosion". The investigations of the prosecutor's office also revealed that near the explosion, near the base of lane number 6, a trolley was being lifted using machinery, at a time when a small cloud of fuel vapours was forming. The proximity of this operation, but at the moment there is only one hypothesis under investigation, could have contributed to the trigger. The vapour smoke is the same as that reported by some witnesses and would correspond to that seen in the first publicly available video of the explosion.
The Prato prosecutor's office will carry out an inspection of the Eni site next Monday with the consultants in charge of a technical assessment. The safety and emergency plans are also being examined, both the one inside the depot and the external plans, available from the competent bodies in the area, including the prefecture of Florence, also for the civil protection aspects connected to the presence of high-risk sites. The safety plans will be compared with each other and the guidelines dictated to the operators will be examined. The investigations are moving on the hypotheses of the crime of malicious collapse of buildings (this is the case of possible damage or failure on the site) and on work safety cases (the removal of precautions).
The Carabinieri are focusing their investigations on the precautions taken or not taken in the depot during the extraordinary maintenance work. The investigators continue to collect testimonies from those who can report something useful about what happened that morning and are acquiring documents, on the instructions of the prosecutor, from the companies involved, including those relating to the relationships between the client Eni and the contractors, service methods on the extraordinary maintenance in progress and on access to the loading bays of the tankers from outside. Finally, the bodies of the five victims must remain at the disposal of the judicial authorities for a few more days for further investigations after the autopsies, already carried out, then they should be returned to the families in the first days of next week for the funerals.
(Online Union)