Lesson at Barrackpore

THE EXPLOSION of Petrotrin’s six-inch gas line at Barrackpore on Tuesday morning fortunately did no damage either to the environent or nearby residences. With loud explosions and a tower of flame rising some 150 feet in the air, the explosion did however create some panic among the villagers, with some of them scampering for safety out of the fear that the entire oilfield had gone up in flames. “When I hear the explosions, one after the other, I run for my life,” said Dennis Mohammed. His neighbour, Shawn Felix, said he thought he was going to die. “I say, God, if I have to die, I dying right here.”

The broken line, we understand, feeds gas to a compressor on Wilson Road which is used to pump crude oil to Petrotrin’s Pointe-a-Pierre refinery. The reaction of the company in dealing with the explosion, we are pleased to note, was quite prompt. According to Manager of Corporate Communications Arnold Corneal, the compressing plant was immediately shut down and the escaping gas burned for some 20 minutes. The problem we seem to have with this incident, however, is the fact that while Petrotrin’s gas lines are monitored and checked regularly — at least that is what we are told — the leak was not discovered until it exploded and no one could say exactly how it started.

Now there are two ways we can look at Monday’s fiery blowout at Barrackpore. We can regard it simply as a harmless freak accident which would not happen again in a long time, if ever. In which case, we may dismiss it summarily. Or we can consider it a timely and valuable warning about general safety levels and measures observed not only by Petrotrin but by the entire energy sector.  We have no intention of creating undue alarm about this since we recognise that the safety practices of oil and gas companies operating in TT have been such that serious accidents in this industrial area have been few and far between. However, the Barrackpore incident tells us that we cannot be too safe about safety and, with the kind of inflammable and explosive stuff that fuels this sector, safety is certainly not a matter that we can take for granted.

In this regard, we would like to believe that Monday’s fiery leak would prompt all the stakeholders in the country’s energy sector to review their safety programmes with a view to possibly updating or enhancing them. Residential communities existing close to oil and gas installations need to be reassured that every possible precaution, every possible measure, every possible system is in place to ensure their safety. The gas blaze at Barrackpore should not have happened, but it did. Fortunately, no damage was done. But the warning inherent in its eruption should not be ignored.