Guwahati Refinery conducts offsite disaster mock drill

GUWAHATI: An offsite disaster mock drill was conducted by Guwahati Refinery on Wednesday in association with Kamrup (metro) district administration to check the effectiveness of the emergency response and preparedness of the Refinery in tackling emergency situations in case of any offsite disaster.

The scenario considered was detection of heavy accumulation of oil in the open channel along Road no.3 near Hay Filter-7. On subsequent reporting to concerned depts, action was immediately taken to identify the source of the leakage. Meanwhile, Fire and Safety personnel immediately rushed to the location and on seeing both heavy accumulation of oil and some oil already crossing the boundary wall of the refinery, the gate at open channel outlet was immediately closed to prevent oil from further going outside Refinery boundary. Immediately, foam application was attended near the open channel outlet for preventing occurrence of fire inside the refinery and the major fire siren was blown off.

Meanwhile, the ignition of the spilled oil occurred due to vehicles running on the road outside GR and the fire engulfed the open channel area towards West of GR to the Noonmati market area adjacent to the Railway tracks. The fire also spread inside the refinery area through the open channel along Road no. 3. Accordingly, the Chief Incident Controller consulted the district authority and offsite disaster was declared. Immediately, help was sought from State Fire Services to control the fire outside the refinery. Upon receiving directives from district authority, all agencies sprang into action and the situation was brought under control. Meanwhile, the source of the leakage was attended and fire was extinguished both inside and outside the refinery.

Accordingly, after the situation was brought under control, the all clear siren was blown in discussion with both the site incident coordinator as well as from the district authority. After the drill, a debriefing session was conducted where S P Singh, Executive Director & Refinery Head, Guwahati Refinery, chaired the meeting in the presence of senior officials of Guwahati Refinery and other agencies like Petroleum & Explosive Safety Organization (PESO), District Disaster Management Authority, District Health Services, National Disaster Response Force, Civil Defence, Railways, Indian Oil AOD , Guwahati-Siliguri Pipeline, Noonmati Police etc.

Singh laid emphasis on the varied observations and the suggestions and focused on the varied ways to further improve the emergency response.

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