A smart kid, with a bright future ahead, despite the fact that he came from a poor family, has died last week due to the criminal negligence of the oil giant OMV Petrom. Marian Furcelea was found dead near a well pipe. The little boy, aged almost ten, has stopped near the well in order to try on a pair of shoes he has received for charity from an old lady his mother was taking care of.
Last Thursday, Marian was gifted a bag of shoes from the old lady his mother was taking care of, for him to share with his other three brothers, two boys and a girl. ”I take care o an old woman who lives across from his school. The boy finished the classes and came to see me, as he usually did. He was very happy that tha lady has given us a few pairs of shoes for him and his brothers. We are poor people and the children enjoy anything. He chose three pairs and insisted on him taking them home. I explained that I would take them, but I couldn’t het along with him. He was very excited. He left around 13.00. I drove him to the gate, I took him across the street, I kissed him and I told him to go home, to take care to follow the road. It was the last time I saw my baby”, said Elena, Marian’s mother, with her voice drowned in tears and face torn by pain.
Visibly affected, Elena recalls sensing somehow that something bad was going to happen that day. ”Since the morning I had a sad heart. I was talking to the lady I take care of and even if she cannot see, she sensed me<> I tod her I was fine, but I could feel something was wrong. Whithin an hour since my boy left, I don’t know what came over me, I called my husband and asked him if Marian had arrived. He told me Mari didn’t arrive and he asked me where he was. That’s when we both panicked.”, says the grieving mother.
As Marian was never late, the parents immediately started the searches. ”I left all the works and I started the search. I ran back home, took my husband and we started to search for him. At that point, we didn’t call the Police as I had to look for him. I did look for him. I went over his friends, relatives, I looked for him on all of the streets of the village, on all the fields, but in vain. Nobody knew anything! Finally, we announced the Police. The local police told us that they can begin the search only after 24 hours, because this is the proceduce. Seeing that I insist so much, the police officer here helped us look for him. We wanted to call 112, but we didn’t make the call right then. A little later, seeing that we cannot find him, Adrian, my oldest son, called 112. Forensic Police came, and they began their search, too”, remembers Elena.
From that moment on, the search continued in two teams: the police on one hand and the family on the other. ” It was already night but we kept on searching. I was on my way to Nedelea when the Police called. <>. They didn’t say whether he was alive or not. They wouldn’t say. I lived all this way hoping that our son was still alive. We were happy. When we reached the police station, I was given the schoolbag, the bag of shoes and they told me he was gone.”, recalls Elena Furcelea, in tears. They told me that the ones in the night sift, I don’t know how, have found him near the well, knocked down, thinking he was a drunk man. That’s when they called the police”(…)
Since the date of the tragedy until this day, no OMV Petrom representative has come down to the place where it all happened, to present its condolences to the family of the victim. “Nobody from Petrom showed up to at least tell us they’re sorry. We have received not one phone call, not a good word, nothing!” the mother of the child killed by the petroleum gas.
The OMV Petrom extraction probe No. 365 from Ariceştii Rahtivani is placed on a little street in the Ariceştii Rahtivani village, only a few hundred meters from the local school. Following discussions we had with the people involved in the child’s search, we found out that the petroleum gas exhaust pipe from the extraction point wasn’t covered with anything at the moment when the tragedy happened. Normally, gas releases in the atmosphere should have been stopped with the help of a special device, which was missing. This device, which needs to be fixed and closed on the muzzle to stop exhaust fumes, was found on the ground, near the basis of the extraction pit.
“That was always a dangerous place! The probe is on a street which connects the school and our home. Right next to it there’s a household. They’ve put a manometer right after the gas killed Marian. All probes from Aricesti are the same” the grieving mother tells us.
People living in the area where the tragedy took place tell us the fact that the device missing is not accidental.“ This pipeline has been left like this for years now and there are some that come and steal gasoline directly from the probe shaft. Neither did the people from Petrom, nor the policemen from our village want to see this” a local declared to us. The people from the village are pointing the finger to the Petrom employees as authors of the theft, the same ones who are actually supposed to ensure the safety of the installations. The process was relatively simple; after they removed the protection device, they would put at the pipeline’s muzzle the so-called “goose” – the recipient in which they collected the gasoline. After a few hours, they would come back to take the gas condensation that would pile up in a canister and let the “goose” collect further. Apparently, the operation works at its best during this time of the year, since the outdoor temperatures help out with the gas condensation.
The gas leaked from this hole was what killed Marian. According to the forensic specialists, he suffered a "toxic pulmonary edema, caused by acute poisoning petroleum gas."
“As far as I know him, he must have stopped near the probe to try on the new shoes the teacher had given him” the mother tells us, torn by pain. To this hour, OMV Petrom has not replied to our request to offer their point of view, request that was sent to them on February 28th 2014.
This is the first episode of our investigation, through which we will demonstrate that the tragedy from Aricesti is not “an accident, a random event”, but a direct consequence of the criminal carelessness with which OMV Petrom is treating the petroleum exploitations from Prahova.
