It will not be easy for this coastal town to forget that Sunday morning of the 14th September when it was shaken by a series of blasts from the nearby refinery complex of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL).
The memory of charred bodies, burnt out vehicles and shattered buildings would continue to haunt the town for years. It would take much longer to heal the bruised pride of the HPCL workforce.
Though the loss to the corporation in finanacial terms is virtually nil since all the equipment and machinery, along with its profits, are comprehensively insured, it is its record of 13.77 million accident-free manhours that has taken a beating.
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The loss to the country is also being assessed at a nominal Rs 68 crore which it would have to pay for refining the imported crude that could have been processed at Vizag during the refinerys expected eight-week closure for a thorough safety check of the entire system. The product availability is also ensured by a mere conincidence since extra imports had been arranged in view of the planned shut-down of the refinery for 60 days from September 10. Tankers are already floating and are ready for discharge.
Besides, other refineries are being asked to step up production of all products, especially LPG and the shut-down of HPCLs Mumbai refinery planned for October is being deferred.
Though a number of stories about the cause of the accident are taking rounds of this sleepy town, officials assert that a small cloud of LPG vapours had formed near the storage spheres of LPG which was being unloaded into them from a tanker carrying the imported product. Being completely odourless, the cloud went unnoticed initially. Moreover, it being the wee hours of a Sunday, there were very few people in the complex to notice the cloud.
It is still not known as to what caused the spark that lit the cloud, but the explosion was of an unprecedented magnitude tossing up human bodies and buidings.
All those witnin the 500 metre radius of the explosion where killed. The buidings came down with a thud and storage tanks in the nearby marketing complex dented.
The explosion claimed its victims among the towns inhabitants as well. A number of people with weak or ailing hearts suffered fatal strokes.
Many ran towards nearby hills only to invite snake-bites. Some others are still in hospitals recovering from the shock.
While it will be some time before the number of official agencies probing to the cause of blast submit their reports, the accident exposes the vulnerability of refinery complexes to such disasters. Even a pinhole leak in any of the numerous pipelines connecting the harbour to the storage tanks could have caused the cloud formation responsible for the mishap.
It goes to the credit of HPCL that the corporation could contain the damage to a limited area around the blast site and that the massive watering and foaming operations undertaken by it prevented any damage to the refinery. The corporation also deserves credit for trying hard to bring the refinery back on rails within about eight weeks. But the incident has also brought out in bold relief the fact that either the safety norms in the countrys refineries need urgent upgrading, or their implementation has to be stricter.