Venezuelan firefighters battled Monday to extinguish a devastating fire at the country's main oil refinery as President Hugo Chavez criticized reports that poor maintenance was to blame. Venezuela is South America's biggest oil producer, and more than 30 hours after the worst accident in the history of state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) killed 41 people, authorities were still struggling to extinguish flames in two of nine storage tanks that caught fire at the refinery on Saturday. “We estimate that this situation will be resolved in the coming hours," Energy Minister and PDVSA president Rafael Ramirez said on state television. “This situation may be causing alarm, but we have confined [the fire]." He predicted that production at the refinery would resume two days after the fire had been brought under control. Vice President Elias Jaua said “erratic winds" were complicating the work of firefighters in trying to extinguish huge flames spilling out of the tanks that could be seen from kilometers away, but he insisted the situation was “under control." Of the 41 dead, at least 18 were National Guard soldiers and 15 were civilians, most of them relatives of the soldiers. Six more bodies were unidentified. The Amuay refinery, in the far north of Venezuela, is located in a residential and commercial complex where workers live with their relatives and poor families who settled in surrounding neighborhoods. At total of 121 people, including 48 children, were receiving medical and psychological care at a naval base, according to authorities who reported that 209 homes and 11 businesses had been affected by the incident.
