| Jame Bonds |
Posted
on 09-Jan-03 01:39 PM
Petrol pumps make city a powder keg
Razen Manandhar,
Kathmandu, January 8,
Over a hundred petrol pumps being operated in the densely populated Kathmandu Valley can blow up the capital in minutes as most of them are located in residential areas. Still, no precautions are taken, either by the government or the owners.
The Valley has 105 petrol pumps and 61 of them are in Kathmandu alone. Those are located at residential areas like Teku, Tripureshwor, Sundhara, Sorhakhutte, Balkhu, Baluwatar, Kalimati, Koteshwor, Gyaneshwor, Kuleshwor, Chabahil, Balaju, Panipokhari, Tangal, Baneshwor, Battisputali and others.
Kathmandu has witnessed three accidents in petrol pumps in the past six years -- at Koteshwor in 1996, at Balkumari in 2000 and at Chabahil in 2002-- but fortunately, none of them caused major casualties.
“It seems a million people living in the Kathmandu are standing on a huge time bomb. We cannot even estimate the human loss or damage that could be ignited by any careless person if one single accident takes place,” said Bribhuwan MS Pradhan, the GIS coordinator of KMC, on the basis of a study he conducted four months ago.
The KMC conducted a study on the major petrol pumps of the urban area in August 2002. The study on 14 major petrol pumps showed that they nearly touch one another in 1000-metre influence buffer zones in chains and there are many more pumps in between. A full-swing explosion in a pump can cause the whole of the metropolis to blow up in one single blast, according to Pradhan.
“Such pumps are found almost at every 100-metre distance here,” he said.
A petrol pump is generally built on a n 2,500 square feet area and stores around 50,000 litres of highly inflammable fuel -- petrol, diesel and kerosene -- underground. President of Nepal Petroleum Dealers' Association Saroj Pandey said that the number of petrol pumps are excessively increasing in the residential areas because the government lacks any mechanism to control their growth.
“NOC is not serious to control the risk and the owners are also not serious on the posiblie hazards,” Pandey said.
Executive Officer of KMC Shiva Bhakta Sharma said that the authority concerned should manage the problem if it puts the residents' lives in danger.
Still NOC, the government institution to distribute petroleum productions and issue licenses to run petrol pumps, only takes the issue as a business issue.
“We cannot control or reduce the number of petrol pumps or send them away from the residential areas as they are doing business there. Who will go to buy petrol if they are installed at remote villages?” he asked.
But NOC, one and a half months back, stopped giving licenses to new pumps.
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