Averting Fire Outbreak at Petrol Tank Farms

Barely six months after a fire outbreak at the Linc Oil and Gas Tank Farm in Calabar claimed 10 lives, a tank farm at Ijegun Ibasa in Ojo area of Lagos State was gutted by fire about a fortnight ago. Ejiofor Alike writes on the need for stricter health, safety, and environment practices by the regulatory agencies, the government, and tank farm owners to avert future incidents

Despite the effective Health, Safety and Environment regulations in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry, the sector has continued to record increasing Lost Time Injury incidents. Apparently worried by the number of fatalities recorded in the incidents of 2017, the Department of Petroleum Resources had vowed to achieve its target of attaining zero LTI in the downstream sector in 2018.

Director of DPR, Mr. Mordecai Danteni Baba Ladan, had at the 2017 Annual General Meeting of the Lagos Zonal Office of the agency held late last year, described the ill-fated incidents recorded in 2017 as a dire reminder of the dangers inherent in the operating environment when the operators fail to adhere to safety rules.

Ijegun Ibasa Incident

Barely three weeks into 2018, the industry recorded another incident, when Stallionaire Nigeria Limited’s tank farm at Ijegun Ibasa in Ojo area of Lagos was gutted by fire. Giving an account of the incident, Director of Lagos State Fire Service, Mr Rasak Fadipe, said the service received a distress call at 11:35am that a tank farm was on fire.

“I immediately alerted the Ojo fire station to rush to the scene,” Fadipe said. “I signalled all other stations around. When we got there and discovered that the fire was raging seriously, I had to call on our head office for more fire engines. We discovered that apart from the Premium Motor Spirit (petrol) tank, which was on fire, there were four other tanks surrounding it.”

Fadipe added that with the help of the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency, the National Emergency Management Agency, Nigerian Navy, and the Nigeria Police, the fire was put under control, without any casualty, around 3:30pm.

“Our men are still around, carrying out the necessary checks to ensure that everything is out. We were able to put everything under control with the modern fire engines recently acquired by the Lagos State governor, Mr Akinwunmi Ambode,” Fadipe said.

Also speaking on the fire, General Manager of LASEMA, Mr. Adesina Tiamiyu, said the agency was alerted through the emergency toll free line 112/767.

“Consequently, the agency activated its emergency response plan with all the relevant stakeholders. On getting to the aforementioned address, it was discovered that the facility, which is a fuel depot comprising a five tank farm, of which one of the tanks is filled with petrol, exploded and resulted in big inferno,” Tiamiyu was quoted as saying.

He added, “However, adequate and prompt response by the emergency responders was on ground to curtail the inferno to only the petrol tank, while others (diesel and kerosene) tanks were salvaged from the inferno. Proper investigation would be conducted on the incident, but there is need for owners and managers of oil and gas companies to always ensure that proper emergency response plan is put in place in these kinds of facilities.”

In his own account, a representative of NEMA, Mr Olayinka Ajaba, said the fire incident was caused by a trans-loading problem. Ajaba stated that the tank farm operators were trans-loading petrol manually into a tanker when the fire started and gutted the tanker.

Previous incidents

Though no life was lost at the recent Ijegun fire incident, the tank farm fire was a sad reminder of the July 2017 fire incident at the Linc Oil and Gas Tank Farm in Calabar, in which 10 lives were officially said to have been lost. The Cross River Commissioner of Police, Mr Hafiz Inuwa, who reportedly gave the figure, had also added that several other persons sustained injuries.

Unlike the recent Ijegun fire incident, which NEMA blamed on a trans-loading problem, Inuwa had also stated that the manager of the Linc Oil depot did not brief the police on the cause of the incident.

 “Up until now, nobody has come out to tell us that this is what caused the fire outbreak. We have gone round, we have done what we can do but investigation will later reveal what actually led to the explosion,” the police commissioner said.

The depot manager also reportedly refused to speak with journalists. He claimed that he was not authorised to speak.

However, it was reported that the fire outbreak occurred when the workers of the station were discharging the old product in the tanks to allow a vessel that berthed to discharge its content.

Barely two months after the Calabar tank farm fire, no fewer than four people lost their lives with several others severely injured when the Apapa PWA loading jetty belonging to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation caught fire in September 2017.

Apapa has three jetties – PWA, BOP, and NOJ – all belonging to NNPC, for the discharge of imported petroleum products.

THISDAY gathered that the fire at PWA Jetty started when hoodlums tampered with the manifold, which is the connecting pipe to the vessel, to scoop fuel. It was not clear how hoodlums managed to enter the jetty, which was heavily guarded by personnel of the Nigerian Navy and other security agencies. But there were concerns that security officials might have connived with miscreants, who scooped fuel from the pipelines at the jetty every night and in the early morning hours.

The fire incident was said to have occurred shortly after a vessel, MT HISTIA IVORY, finished discharging petrol at the jetty.

It was also gathered that the casualty figures would have been much higher if security officials of NIPCO Plc on duty had not opened the company’s exit gate through which the people at the jetty escaped from the raging inferno.

A source close to the Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria (MOMAN), which manages the three NNPC jetties in Apapa, had told THISDAY that it took the intervention of fire fighters from the Nigerian Ports Authority and NIPCO to put out the fire.

It will be recalled that a few years ago, an oil vessel owned by MRS Oil and Gas caught fire when discharging petrol into the company’s depot at Tin Can Island area of Apapa. Though no life was lost, NEMA had confirmed that four people were injured.

Proactive Measures

Since the causes of these fire incidents are man-made, experts say there is need for enforcement of HSE regulations by the tank farm owners, regulatory agencies and agencies of government. For instance, the Ijegun fire was said to have started when the tank farm operators were trans-loading petrol manually into a tanker, and that was a flagrant violation of HSE regulations.

In the case of the Calabar Depot, the fire outbreak was said to have occurred when the workers of Linc Oil were discharging old product in the tanks to allow a vessel that berthed to discharge its content. It was also obvious that standard safety procedure was ignored.

Loading at odd hours, breach of HSE rules, lack of fire-fighting equipment, as well as use of sub-standard equipment and vehicles can trigger fire outbreak at a tank farm.

Experts believe there should be effective collaboration between the government and tank farm operators to arrest the flagrant violation of safety guidelines in the industry.

Besides, many believe proactive measures should be put in place to minimise the impact of unavoidable fire outbreak at tank farms. To this end, residents of Ijegun Ibasa community, where the recent tank farm fire occurred in Lagos have called on the state government to set up a fire service station in the community, which has about 10 tank farms established by 10 different companies.