Under banner headlines the Leewards Times of September 27th tells us: ‘US$689 Million Oil Storage Project good for Nevis’. The paper declares their view to be that the NRP led NIA would not bring or allow a project in Nevis that will have dire consequences for our people. It continues, ‘The record of similar projects on the lovely tourism islands, St. Eustatius, St. Lucia, Antigua, St. Maarten and others right here in the Caribbean is there to be a guide to Nevis for the way forward to success for its people’.
It is also the Premier’s position that Statia, St. Lucia and St. Croix have oil terminals, and if they are satisfactory for them, then why not for Nevis. There are two errors in this:
1. Not all Caribbean terminals have proved satisfactory and
2. We are considering risk of minor spills, major spills and disasters. An incident free terminal in one place does not affect the overall risk level, to that terminal or others.
The Leewards suggests that what has happened at Caribbean oil terminals should be a guide for us.
Here is some of this guide:
On October 23rd 2009, a massive vapour cloud explosion simultaneously ignited 17 storage tanks at a petroleum terminal near San Juan, Puerto Rico. Another four storage tanks burned before the blaze was extinguished. A storage tank was being filled with gasoline from a ship docked in San Juan harbour. Shortly after midnight on October 23rd operators observed a foggy apparition spreading North West through the 2.2 million barrel tank farm (for Nevis it would be 12 million). Within 20 minutes of that discovery the vapour cloud ignited in a massive explosion. The blast did heavy damage to homes and businesses more than a mile away. Investigations estimated that the vapour cloud spread to a 2000 foot diameter until it reached an ignition source. Boom. Investigators were unsure how long the tank overflowed.
In September 2010 a fire burned for 55 hours at a Bonaire fuel tank storage. The tank contained 20,000 gallons of Naptha, an oil derivative. Perhaps fortunately it was all on land and did not flow into the sea. It was said to have been caused by lightening. Black clouds billowed 10,000 feet over the island. A biologist found the leaves of plants within 2 ½ miles of the burn site to be coated with oil. Thus the toxins would get into the food chain via sheep and cattle.
In September 1989 Hurricane Hugo having passed over Nevis where there were no oil storage tanks hit St. Croix where wind pressure crumpled five tanks like paper cups and sucked out the oil, which was then spewed over a wide area contaminating beaches and water supplies.
A 1999 seminar on Chemical Plant Risk in time of hurricane notes that empty or part empty tanks are more susceptible to damage than full ones. During an earthquake the liquid is mobile and sloshing around with a tendency to climb up one side of the tank. This causes a local loop stress in the tank wall which could cause a rupture and spill. Earthquakes also put stress on connecting pipelines and on foundations. Any damage to foundations can put the tank out of true and may cause damage to the floating roof seals. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina caused numerous oil spills in SE Louisiana, with a total of more than eight million gallons mostly from damaged storage tanks.
Although a tsunami is intrinsically less likely than hurricanes and earthquakes it cannot be taken out of a risk assessment. In 1867 a tsunami killed 30 people in St. Croix. At that time the population was smaller and lived more inland than today. What it could do today would depend upon its severity. If it caught moored tankers by surprise perhaps it could break them up and wash them and their contents ashore.
August 2012. An extensive fuel spill fouled a stretch of Curacao coastline. It was said to have come from at least one storage tank owned by the Isla oil refinery. A commentator said: ‘This is probably the biggest environmental disaster in Curacao. The whole area of Jan Kok is black. The crabs are black. The birds are black. The plants are black. Everything is draped in oil. The spill covers an area of about 30 football pitches. Three distinct oil slicks are floating offshore and are threatening the South coast of Curacao’. The Caribbean lacks the resources and the expertise to combat oil spills.
SMOC, an environmental organization in Curacao said that they had been fighting the Company for at least ten years, and that there is no inspection and no enforcement of permits and laws. Why would it be different here? The Company would be all powerful and regulate or fail to regulate itself.
August 2012. 42 were killed and 151 injured in a giant explosion following a gas leak that set off a raging four day fire at Venezuela’s largest oil refinery. 1600 homes were damaged. Some say that the company failed to carry out essential maintenance work and did not improve safety standards after earlier accidents. Some say they smelled the gas (leak) for days before the accident. The alarm bell should have been activated by the leak. It did not ring. People smelled strong fumes several hours before the blast, many said that did not worry them as they had smelled such odours before.
September 2012. An electrical storm set fire to two Naptha storage tanks in Venezuela.
There is now quite a bit on line about the Statia oil storage terminal owned by the large US Company Nu Star. There are 67 tanks having a capacity of 13 million barrels. Nu Star has applied for permission to build a further 31 tanks. It is instructive to see what NuStar on the one hand and the Statia environmental protection organisations on the other, have to say.
Nu Star says that people should not worry about the risks, as the facility would be built according to the very stringent Dutch PGS 29 Code which dictates that tanks have to be at a certain distance from each other. The Company said there would be no risk of a large fire because safety measures would prevent this from happening. Each tank would be surrounded by a dike with an area that can control 110% of the contents of the tank. A vapour recovery system will be included to control and recover possible vapour.
The Statia environmentalists say ‘The risk of pollution is palpable. In February 2002 the calling tanker Pauline dumped its bilges of oil tainted ballast water which went unnoticed until dawn. By that time the oil had fouled the length of the island and polluted the marine park, harbour and shoreline’. Nearly ten years later the St. Eustatius National Parks Foundation has yet to receive restitution for clean up of this incident.
A decade earlier one of the terminal’s 24” pipelines ruptured, spilling oil at a rate of 336,000 gallons per hour and creating a slick some 20 miles long. In fact there have been a dozen major tanker spills in the Caribbean, making it a ‘high risk’ area according to The International Tanker Owner Pollution Federation. One such incident, a collision between super tankers Atlantic Empress and Aegean Captain remains the largest ship based accident in history. The tankers laden with more than half a millions tons of crude collided off Tobago during a tropical storm, killing 26 crew as 287,000 tons of oil spewed and blazed from the wreckage. This was 40 times the amount of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
‘We’ve been fighting with Nu Star for years to get the money for tanker moorage fees which is in the law’, said Marine Park Manager Jessica Berkel. A researcher questioned Nu Star statistics saying ‘It is a question of what qualifies as no accident. There are incidents … may be not a BP spill, but still an accident; still a leak, and still harmful’.
I could choose from hundreds of accidents to highlight risks. Accidents that cause 500 deaths, accidents like that at Buncefield, which had it taken place on a work day rather than on a Sunday morning, might have caused thousands of deaths and injuries. Here is one more, then I shall stop.
In August 2012 a vapour cloud at Chevron’s Richmond CA refinery, which came from a pipeline servicing a unit, ignited causing a fire. Ben Sloane a maintenance specialist for Chevron had told (safety) regulators in 2010 that vapour cloud ignition could never happen in California.
The US Coastguard – Office of Investigation and Analysis has a website where it lists notable oil spills in US waters 1989-2009. Each year the Coast Guard investigates several thousand polluting incidents in waters off the US. More than 70% in each year’s spill volume can be attributed to less than 20 incidents.
Available on line at www.sciencedirect.com under heading, ‘A Study of Storage Tank Accidents by James I. Chang’ reviews 242 accidents (referred to in my first article). This should persuade anyone that whatever precautions are taken accidents are always liable to happen and the larger the amount of flammable material in storage and transit the higher the chance that an accident will be serious or even catastrophic.
Under the title ‘The 100 Largest Losses 1972-2009’ Marsh’s Energy Practice writes in its foreword ‘No-one who has been in these industries (chemical/petroleum) for very long would ever say “That will never happen again”.
Statia has around 800 tankers per year discharging and receiving mostly off shore. Ships tend to collide at or near terminals rather than at sea in the shipping lanes.
We live on tourism as our number one industry, with construction, itself partly dependent on tourism, as number two. Statia does not live on tourism, it lives on its oil storage facility. It is as I said in my first article, preposterous of ‘Pink Shirt’ to state that his project would enhance tourism. It puts it at risk. If we lose it, what do we then have? We should not accept the commercial hype of the adventurers from Canada. The sooner a graceful exit is made the better for Nevis. The possibility of jobs is trumped by the risks and the unpleasantness of an oil terminal.
A blogger on Nevis Politics questions who might financially be behind the Nevis project since ‘Pink Shirt’ and Co. clearly were not. He speculated ‘Russian, Iran, The Arabs, Venezuela’. More likely might be Communist China. That country has recently taken over Saudi Arabia’s leases at the Nu Star Statia terminal, and it is believed that this area is ideal for storage and bunkering of tankers from Brazil and Venezuela, carrying oil from there via the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal to China. Whoever it may be you can be sure that they will have no interest in what may happen to Nevis environmentally or economically.
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