A Matter of Will › Fire in Giant Tankers › Granma

These days, a lifeguard in uniform doesn’t wait even five minutes at a stop in Matanzas. Just after 6 p.m. on Monday, Yisrael Tabanis Torres was on his back in the area known as Viaduct, stretching out his arm and asking the newspaper’s car for a “bottle.” granma.

He asks “To Canimao?” And we say yes. We head to this hotel on the outskirts of town, where part of our team, other journalists, and people facing the fire are staying.

Israel rises. He is a young man – he is 31, we will find out later – he wears the red overalls of the Cuban Red Cross, a black sash around his neck, and underneath appears a bandage covering the burn on his back. his neck.

It piques our curiosity, what is the lifeguard doing alone, at that hour, navigating around town? His story at the event began at 7:30pm on Friday, August 6th. This was the first time he had encountered something like this.

At dawn on Saturday, they were witnessing in the damaged tanks area minor injuries to firefighters, and then a huge explosion occurred. “At that time it was all about running, a huge steam came over us, I ran and ran, and I felt it hitting me in the neck.”

He does not know the degree of his burn, the nurse did not tell him and did not ask. His superiors preferred to remain secluded in the dwelling. The rest was not on Saturday or Sunday. But after a complicated Monday morning, about noon, they sent for him, and things promised to get uglier.

After two blasts, they decided the scenario wasn’t going to get any worse, and “and they brought me back to rest.”

We want to know how things are going “over there”, if there are wounded or wounded. He assures us that no, that there is no destruction at the supertanker facilities, and that every time the jigsaw gets complicated, the troops withdraw.

He says that after that first morning they became more cautious and very concerned about the slightest sign.

Israel from Los Mangos, a neighborhood in the city of Matanzas. He was a master of commerce in the mayor’s office and is now a grocer in a military establishment. He got to know the Red Cross through some friends, and decided he wanted to join it.

After the COVID-19 pandemic subsided, less than a year ago, he did the necessary training and joined. At that time he was only engaged in the search and rescue of the missing.

When asked why he had chosen to take on such a risky mission, he answered exactly, barely, like the life-savior we met on Earth hours earlier: “This is voluntary.”

We ask for your opinion on how the fire developed. His vision, after what he discussed with his more experienced colleagues and firefighters, is hopeful.

He doesn’t think the new eruptions can be any better than the ones that have already occurred there. But nothing is written in incidents of this kind; Perhaps except for one thing: will. And that – a car ride of just a few minutes is enough to ensure this – Israel does not lack.