Following the recent fire outbreak that rocked a barge laden with PMS at the tank farm facility of MRS Oil and Gas Services at the Tin Can Island Port in Lagos, stakeholders in the oil and gas sector have called on organizations in the industry to train personnel on safety and fire fighting programme.
Some of the stakeholders who spoke with Shipping Position Daily, last week stressed the need for tank farm owners to upgrade their firefighting equipment as most of the gadgets in their possessions are obsolete.
Following the recent fire outbreak that rocked a barge laden with PMS at the tank farm facility of MRS Oil and Gas Services at the Tin Can Island Port in Lagos, stakeholders in the oil and gas sector have called on organizations in the industry to train personnel on safety and fire fighting programme.
Some of the stakeholders who spoke with Shipping Position Daily, last week stressed the need for tank farm owners to upgrade their firefighting equipment as most of the gadgets in their possessions are obsolete.
A Petroleum Marketer, Mr. Olanife Adeoye, urged tank farm operators to train personnel on modern trends on safety measures even as he added that there has been shortage of personnel in the aspect of safety in the oil and gas industry.
“There should be proper training, that is they should send men from these depots on training whether locally or abroad in order to empower them through man power development or human resource development, they should arrange for where two or more people would be sent for training on how to maintain security during small or medium fire outbreak”.
He said that “the handling of hoses into the system we are operating in Nigeria is outdated, ordinarily it should be an underground cable, we are now using surfaced hoses where you will join one hose to the other and you know PMS is like a gas, it can leak from anywhere, so the system is outdated”.
Adeoye however urged the Department of Petroleum Resources DPR to do their work as it should be done, adding that there is a supervisory body which should further ensure that they are always on a stand-by when the need arises “in order to watch over the discharge of every products that are being received from the ship, in order to test firstly the quality to know if they met the standard required from the mandate, secondly, to ensure that the mode of receiving it is in good shape in order to avoid spill”.
He therefore charged the DPR and the NNPC to order all Depots to begin the installation of underground Cables or Hoses for the discharge of their products instead of the surface Cable they are presently using because of any unforeseen danger; therefore they should embark on underground Cable.
“There is need for training of manpower, sending experts to each of these Depots to train them, advise them one way or the other in the process of receiving these products so that they can be better equipped”.
“These people should be trained on firefighting, in preventing leakages in the modern type of equipment, hoses that can be used that will never allow leakages in case they are still using the old hoses, there are some chemicals that can be smeared on the joints where they joined hoses together that products can never leak out during the process of discharge”.
Adeoye also stated that the Internet could also be used as a way of getting information across the world adding that internet services should be made available to the various depots to access the website and view live operations.
According to him, “the world is global village where you can see live in every nooks and crannies of the world so you may not have to settle in Abroad, the moment you subscribe, and you get their permission, you pay them peanut, then you will watch the operations live and if you want them to train you online”.
In a same vein, Mr. Aisuodionoe Ose Fidel called for the creation of awareness on safety means against future occurrence of fire outbreak within the tank farm vicinity.
Aisuodionoe said that human capacity development which is about 50% ensures good control of fire and suggested that the facilities involved in fire fighting should be refurbished.
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