Several employees of seafood company Pritipaul Singh Investments (PSI) escaped with minor injuries following an explosion onboard a fuel boat at the company’s Mc Doom, East Bank Demerara (EBD) operations yesterday.
According to reports, around 10.30 am yesterday, employees of the company were filling gas tanks on board the fuel boat MV Silver Angel when one of the hoses connected to a fuel pump burst causing fuel to spill onto the pump. The escaped fuel caught an exhaust pipe on the pump and ignited, resulting in an explosion on board the vessel.
According to safety officer of PSI, Brentnol Gibbs, no one was injured in the incident. He told Stabroek News that members of the Guyana Fire Service (GFS) were summoned to the scene within minutes of the explosion and he could not say offhand what caused the explosion. He said the explosion resulted in extensive damage to the MV Silver Angel adding that its interior was severely damaged.
Asked whether there were similar incidents prior to yesterday’s onboard the vessel, Gibbs responded in the negative.
Two employees of PSI told Stabroek News that yesterday morning they were working at the processing section of PSI’s seafood operations when they heard an explosion.
One of the men said he ran to the wharf and he observed the entire boat in flames while employees scampered to safety.
He said one of his colleagues, who sustained a “slight” burn to his leg, related that three persons were loading fuel onto the vessel when the incident occurred. “Is the pump what they had pumping fuel into the boat cause it… he tell we the hose slip out,” the man stated.
“Like it does happen regularly so this morning like they ain’t expect it to spill fuel all over the place and the fuel end up running towards the exhaust and it just blow up the place,” the man added.
He said the men managed to run away from the scene with minor burns while the boat was being consumed by flames and other persons who were onboard the vessel at the time managed to scamper to safety.
“They lucky it didn’t have any boat close by because this whole place coulda burn down and some people woulda get injured,” the man added.
When members of the GFS arrived at the scene the vessel was already badly burned and the firemen and employees of PSI managed to tow the vessel out of the harbour into the river where the fire was completely extinguished.
According to an employee of PSI, “this was bound to happen because these guys working on these boats don’t know anything about safety so these things will continue to pop up”. He said that several months ago there was a similar incident onboard another fuel vessel.
The safety record of the seafood company had been flagged in the past.
In June 2010, one of the company’s fishing vessels, the Captain Lloyd 97, exploded in the Atlantic outside the Waini coast while its crew were fixing a problem in the vessel’s engine room.
The vessel’s captain Delbert Williams, 46, remains missing and presumed dead, while crew member Orlon Munroe, 18, succumbed to his injuries three months after the incident; he was severely burned. Another crew member, George Fitzpatrick, also sustained severe burns about his body and he too was hospitalized for several weeks.
The incident prompted a detailed investigation which was undertaken by several government agencies and led by the Transport Ministry. The preliminary inquiry of the team’s findings, which were released several months, later slammed PSI over its operations after concluding that a faulty alternator aboard the vessel sparked the blaze.
The inquiry then visited three PSI locations: Providence Shore operations, McDoom Shore operations and the Trawler Operations where it found various problems including fire extinguishers which had expired and needed to be serviced or replaced.
The report released following this visit concluded: “It is abundantly clear that the emphasis in the company is to maximize production, which is expected and understandable, but this ought not to be achieved at the expense of health and safety of employees and contractors.”
