Environmental scare as fire guts oil storage

GORDON KIMBLEY
Correspondent | Tuesday April 17, 2007 00:00

 

The heat from the fire, whose cause is still unknown, was so intense it could be felt some 200 metres from the scene, sending motorists into a panic. Burning were thousands of oil containers - from the small 500 ml tins to the big 200-litre drums and it took a combined team of Gaborone City Council firefighters from the main station and the Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, Botswana Police and the Botswana Defence Force (BDF), who arrived a little later. Oil flowed onto the street and into the storm water drainage system en route to the Notwane River, which feeds into the Gaborone Dam, immediately becoming a big environmental hazard.

In the morning a number of little birds that had mistaken the oil for water hopped by, drenched in the oil. One bird lover was seen with a bird in hand, trying to wash the oil off its feathers.
'The problem is that water was used to douse the fire, and water is not good for putting out such fires as oil floats on the water,' said Willie Buitendag whose company Rapid Spill Response was immediately called from South Africa to assist in cleaning the spilt oil.
'We have two contractors cleaning the storm water system. We aim to recover as much of the spill as is possible by Sunday,' he said. By Saturday noon, cleaning chemicals were being off-loaded. Buitendag said that they arrived just in time to arrest the spillage before it could get into the river.

'We got it very close to the river, and any delay in arranging for its cleaning would have resulted in it flowing into the river,' he said.  The Notwane River supports a delicate ecosystem already disturbed by developments along its course to the Gaborone Dam. The dam itself, in addition to supporting various fish, wildlife and fauna, provides drinking water to Gaborone and the Greater Gaborone areas, which include villages such as Mochudi, Ramotswa, Mogoditshane and Tlokweng, with a combined population of over 400,000 people.

However, Buitendag said his team would only be able to clean the area where the warehouse stood after forensic investigators had finished their work.
The last few months have seen a number of major fires in warehouse and stores in the same area. These include the burning down of CA Sales wholesalers and Jamal Trading Company, where millions of Pula worth of goods were completely destroyed.
'The way in which these buildings burn, especially that it happens after hours when nobody is around, is suspect,' said one of hundreds of spectators at the scene.

However, Ned Graorac of African Express said it was unfortunate that people tended to think that if it happened elsewhere that someone burnt down a building for insurance purposes, it would always be the case when a building burns.
' African Express is a company with a robust reputation and we would not risk our reputation. Investigations into the cause of the fire are continuing and we will hopefully know after the investigation is complete,' he said. He added that his company had a number of business interests which include courier services and trucking and that storage was just one of the many businesses they were involved in. In this case they were trading as agents for Shell - transporting and storing oil for the company.
Graorac said he was called at around 5pm - an hour after closing his warehouse and found police and fire fighters battling the inferno. He said that business would not be affected.

'We will be transporting stock from Durban to ensure that there is no shortage. We also have a 5000m2 warehouse at Block 8,' he said, adding his major concern was to ensure the oil did not become an environmental danger, given the fact that it had flowed into the storm water drainage.
Botswana Development Corpo-ration  (BDC) owns the gutted building.
'The building is owned by Western Industrial Estates, which is wholly owned by BDC,' BDC property development and management manager Letsweletse Ramokate said.
Ramokate said that most buildings in the area were owned by BDC.

Asked if the fire does not provide a lesson to BDC that inflammable substances need to be stored away from densely populated areas, Ramokate said the incident would surely act as a reminder that something needed to be done about such buildings.
'We are only lucky that the burning substance was not petrol or some other substance more flammable than oil - the risk would have been very high,' he said.
He said that BDC had rented the building to African Express and that BDC would be meeting with the company to chart the way forward.

The fire occurring in a densely populated industrial area, very close to a main highway, a paper manufacturing company, a filling station, and across the road, a residential area could easily have turned into a huge catastrophe as hundreds of people thronged the scene, even hampering efforts by the police to coordinate operations.
'We have been trying to get these people away from this place, but they will not budge. You can imagine what would happen if one of those drums exploded, a police officer said.
'I wonder why government has allowed these hazardous storages right in the middle of town,' said a bystander at the scene.
There are two major fuel storage facilities in Gaborone - one in the Old Industrial area and the other opposite Commerce Park.