Gas leak kills 2, injures 5 in refinery near Iran-Turkmenistan border
A major leak incident at a gas refinery in northeastern Iran has left two people dead and five more injured.
Iran’s official IRNA news agency said on Thursday that natural gas had accumulated behind a valve that was under repair at Shahid Hasheminejad Refinery near the northeastern city of Sarakhs before it leaked and killed two people.
Sarakhs is located in a gas-rich region near Iran’s border with Turkmenistan and some 170 kilometers to the east of Mashhad, the capital of Iran’s Khorasan Razavi province and the country’s second largest city.
The two killed in the incident were staff workers of the refinery who had inhaled gas after it leaked, said the top provincial security official Mohammad Zohdi who added that the five injured in the incident were transferred to a hospital in Sarakhs and are now in a stable condition.
The official did not mention any other reason for the incident, including sabotage while there was no indication of an explosion caused by the leak as reported by some foreign news agencies.
The gas refinery near Sarakhs is the oldest in Iran. It processes natural gas from four fields in the Khangiran region, including a massive sour gas reserve which has an annual gas production capacity of 550 billion cubic meters.
The gas reserve is one of the few operating in the northern regions of Iran as many of the country’s petroleum industry facilities are concentrated in and around the Persian Gulf in the south.
There was no immediate report about the impact of the incident in Khangiran refinery on gas supply to Iran’s eastern provinces.
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