Fire at Venezuela’s Cardón refinery halts operations, staff evacuated

The suspension of Cardón matters less for its own output than for what it signals about Venezuela's already fragile refining system, where unplanned outages have become a recurring feature rather than an exception. The immediate question is duration: temporary halts at damaged units have a habit of stretching when maintenance capacity and spare parts are constrained. Whether production resumes on the stated timeline, and whether the cause points to operational decay rather than an isolated incident, is the open question worth tracking.