Some stakeholders in the downstream sector of the oil and gas industry have condemned the unfortunate inferno which occurred last week at the Orile Truck Terminal. The incident reportedly claimed some lives and destroyed 19 petroleum tankers. They argued that it may have been the consequence of negligence and non-compliance to basic safety requirements.
The stakeholders said that if the truck terminal had been adequately equipped with the necessary fire extinguishers and a functional standby fire fighting truck, the unfortunate inferno could have been controlled.
A source, who is also a safety manager at one of the truck holding bays in Lagos, told our correspondent that “the unfortunate incident in Orile Trailer Park happened because the operators of that terminal undermined the possibility of a fire accident. There were no provisions for fire extinguishers at the terminal and even the fire fighting gadgets that they have towards the exit of the terminal are not in working order”.
He stressed that the incident remains an eye- opener to other truck parks: “If they have not been taking safety serious they should step up actions to make sure that safety requirements are maintained because some of these trucks usually have PMS in them which was the major cause of the fire. In this case, there is need for us to understand the implication of having safety requirements not only at the depots, but also at every other point of call,” he pointed out.
Also recounting the incidence to Shipping Position Weekly, the Lagos zonal chairman of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) Alhaji Tokunbo Korodo stated that “it is simply an act of ignorance”.
Korodo told our reporter that the fire started as a result of the negligence of a truck driver who was “carrying out a welding job on his truck inside the terminal, instead of him to have asked for assistance and permission from the officials there with regards to fire extinguishers, he just carried on, not knowing that there was a truck close by which was fully loaded with PMS”
He said that it was this truck, which was the only one with fuel, that ignited the whole place and affected other trucks and that “it took the intervention of the Lagos State fire fighters to finally off the fire”. Continuing, Korodo, however explained that the Orile truck park plays host to not less than 500 tankers and 19 were damaged in the fire accident.
Shipping Position Weekly also gathered that presently, the worth of each of these truck stands at N11million while the content is worth about N2million for kerosene, N4million for diesel and N4 million for PMS.
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