Just how close is that fuel tank to you?
Most developers like fuel companies have been been faulted for overlooking safety requirements and setting up depots in areas that are busy with human activity. Photo by Ismail Kezaala
Imagine having your home, your child’s school or even that hospital at which a family member or friend is admitted, being situated within the vicinity of a storage tank with highly combustible petroleum fuel – in millions of litres.
The mere thought of it would send shivers down anybody’s spine. Trying to fathom it will make you cringe.
The threat posed
Maybe there is cause to dread the worst. On December 11, 2005, a series of explosions at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal left a total of 43 people injured at Buncefield the United Kingdom.
The terminal was the fifth largest oil-products storage depot in the United Kingdom, with a capacity of about 60,000,000 gallons of fuel. The terminal is owned by TOTAL UK Limited which had 60 per cent stake and Texaco which had 40 per cent.
Worst case scenario would have been if that depot were to be located in a residential area.
The causalities would have been much higher. Yet careful and prudent planning averted that. The terminal was just an industrial complex surrounded by the expansive Buncefield – separating human settlement from the fury of the explosion by miles.
Much as that distance, curtailed the danger to human life, it did not however diminish the magnitude of the event. The explosion did send deep earth waves that could be detected at seismograph stations across the UK and the Netherlands and on infrasound arrays in the Netherlands.
Seismologists using array micro-barometers estimated that the explosion carried a yield the equivalent of 29.5 tons TNT.
To put that into perspective, the worst industrial accident in United States history carried the equivalent of 1.134 kilotons of TNT and that was at the Refineries and oil storage tanks of the Monsanto chemical plant burn in the waterfront area – a hub of human activity – in Texas City, on April 16, 1947.
581 died, and more than 5,000 were injured. With that one would inadvertently say, Buncefield disaster was too close for comfort.
Since then safety and precaution at Oil Depots has improved. However, picking from the two incidents and applying the old adage of ‘better safe than sorry’, wouldn’t one rather have a Buncefield rather than a Texas situation?
Why certain locations are preferred
In Kampala and Uganda in general, fuel depots keep cropping up at different areas that are frightfully close or in the human activity and settlement points.
In Namuwongo, a Kampala suburb, Vivo last year set up 10-million litre capacity tanks atop the hill. Much as Namuwongo is gazetted as an industrial area. It is still a hive of human activity with schools, businesses and even a hospital within the locality of the tanks.
Take an example of Greenhill Academy, which hosts more than 3,000 pupils and students daily. It is only about 250metres from the tanks. Which only has a safety zone – distance between tanks and barrier/fence – of only about 100 metres.
The petroleum (refining, conversion, transmission and midstream storage) Act, 2013, Section 67 denotes that all storage facilities of this nature must have a safety zone surrounding every facility
Whether the 100 metres is enough to ensure safety is a preserve for time to judge best. The accidents in Texas and Buncefield had far-reaching effects. Well beyond the 100 metres subscribed to.
Then there are also the depots in Banda, another Kampala surburb, belonging to MOGAS, remarkably situated in an area not meant for an industrial set-up but rather human settlement.
Brian Lubega, an urban surveyor based in Kampala, says most developers overlook the safety requirement and prefer setting up the tanks in areas busy with human activities, especially along the roadside as a cost saving measure and also to increase their visibility.
“Developers like such sites. They want people to see their brand more and also cut on costs. Imagine the costs they would incur on transportation, if the storage tanks were far removed from town or a main road,” he explains.
“Another risk lies in setting up these tanks atop hills. In case of an explosion, that alone makes the dispersion of the toxic fumes more easier.”
Who is in charge of regulation?
In an ideal setting, the National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA), would wield the power to stomp the petroleum depots out of such localities unfortunately, it holds no sway over who sets up a depot.
“In the Kampala case, the issue of where such depots are setup falls beyond our mandate and burden of risk assessment is usually undertaken by the urban planner who is KCCA,” notes Naome Karekaho, the NEMA spokesperson.
Initially, Promotion and regulation of the oil and gas sector has been undertaken by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development through the Petroleum Exploration and Production Department, (PEPD).
But under the National Oil and Gas Policy, the Ministry will handle the policy aspects, while regulatory and commercial aspects will be handled by Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU) and Uganda National Oil Company (NATOIL) respectively.
“Once the request for location ticks all the safety boxes and the urban planner KCCA has approved in consultation with the responsible entities, we usually sign off as well,” says Karekaho.
Robert Kalumba, a publicist says KCCA has persons that monitor the construction of not only petroleum storage facilities but construction in general.
“The monitoring is in the form of whether you have adhered to the approved construction plans that you submitted to KCCA,” he explains.
“On the issue of storage tanks situated in the proximity of human residential points like Namuwongo, one needs to note that these facilities have existed right before the KCCA took over the management of Kampala.”
He attributes the current state of affairs to poor supervision by past Kampala City Council regimes that allowed these areas have been “encroached’ on by different people including residential properties.
“They actually existed right before the construction of for example the Daily Monitor offices in Namuwongo. These facilities existed in the Industrial Area Corridor; an area which was zoned to have such facilities like industries,” he explains.
“In other words the Industrial Area Corridor is zoned to accommodate such facilities like petroleum storage tanks and not residential or office structures. We even have schools and other structures,” he states.
Whatever the case, whether in an industrial area or not, the proximity of these tanks to human remains a radioactive safety issue and one that needs urgent insight.
These accidents may not be an everyday but when they have happened, history tells of great loss of human life. A better planning mechanism needs to be sought therefore.
