OVH Energy fire in Apapa: A wake-up call

But for the technology that went into constructing the tank, Apapa, Nigeria’s premier port city, would have been plunged into a conflagration with the fire outbreak at the OVH Energy tank facility behind Churchill Police Barracks in the city on Thursday, November 5, 2020.

Thick black smoke billowing into the sky from the fire could be seen several kilometres away from the scene of the incident, creating panic and fear around the immediate Apapa neighbourhoods.

Till the time of writing this editorial, both the thick smoke and huge fire were still pouring into the atmosphere, meaning that if the tank fire were to be like any other, it would have spread to other locations uncontrollably.

This is why, in our view, the OVH Energy tank fire is a wake-up call to all stakeholders in the port city, including residents, business owners, and particularly federal and Lagos State governments that Apapa is sitting on a keg of gunpowder that needs urgent attention.

By the last count, there are 63 tank farms currently located in Apapa and these, according to industry watchers, are posing serious threats to lives, business and infrastructure within the port environment.

Many have noted, and we share their view, that unless something drastic is done to avert that, a day will come when the fire incident that happened in Beirut, Lebanon, would be a child’s play compared to what will happen in Apapa on such a day. It will be much worse because the capacity to respond to emergencies is almost zero, not only in Lagos, but also throughout Nigeria.

Apapa is a very peculiar environment. Unless the country or Lagos develops tomorrow to a point where it can acquire equipment that can respond to emergency from the air, any ground response to emergency in Apapa will be a near-impossibility given the gridlock that has made the port city a loathsome destination.

We join other environmental impact assessors to advise that Lagos State in particular and Nigeria in general should initiate a legislation that would compel owners of tank farms in the city to start the process of relocation of their facilities so as to avert a repeat of the Beirut experience.

The problems which leave Apapa in a delicate balance are not only the tank farms, but also the countless heavy duty trucks that have made the bridges in the port city their parking lot. Even people without any idea of engineering know that this is impacting negatively on the structural stability of these bridges.

Engineers and other well meaning Nigerians have warned of the grave consequences of this practice but nobody is caring; nobody is taking action, not even the government whose statutory responsibility is to lives and property of citizens.

It is pertinent for us to draw attention to an Italy experience where a bridge collapsed a few years ago and the impact was colossal. It was an early Tuesday morning tragedy in that largest city in Rome as a highway bridge, the Morandi Bridge, collapsed over Genoa, causing people, cars and huge slabs of concrete to fall hundreds of feet onto the city below.

That unfortunate incident holds a grave lesson for Nigeria as it calls to mind quickly the thousands of trailers and tankers that are parked almost permanently on the Apapa Bridge, exerting enormous pressure on the bridge and weakening its structural stability.

The collapsed Morandi Bridge, according to the ANSA news agency, is a 1960s-era bridge. It had long been in a chronic state of stress and decay like the Apapa Bridge. Though there had been major structural work done on the bridge, authorities suspected it was still weak.

For us, it is easy to see a similarity between the Morandi Bridge and the Apapa Bridge in terms of age, stress and decay. The Nigerian bridge, according to Babatunde Fashola, the country’s minister for works and housing, was built over 40 years ago and has not received any form of maintenance for that long period of time, yet it is carrying, every night and day, trucks in their hundreds of thousands.

There is no gain-saying that Apapa is economically strategic to both Lagos State and the federal governments. The city is home to the country’s two busiest seaports that account for over 70 percent of import and export activities in the country. It generates billions of naira revenue for the government.

It is sad to note that with all these, the port city is not only neglected, but also left in ruins, neither supporting nor encouraging living or business. It is sadder that government is, indeed, dancing on the graves of businesses in this city because, as it seems, it likes the golden egg, but not the hen that lays it.

Today, it is OVH Energy tank fire which has technology that prevented the disaster that would have ensued. Tomorrow, it could be XYZ Energy that believes in business-as-usual. With this, Apapa might not be as lucky as it is today. So, it is a wake-up call which, we hope, somebody somewhere must answer.