Atomic Junction gas explosion: No Committee will be formed - NPA Boss

Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Petroleum Authority (NPA), Alhassan Tampuli has disclosed to mynewsgh.com that no parallel committee would be formed to unravel the cause of last Saturday’ gas explosion at Atomic Junction in Accra.

Similar incidents in the past saw the NPA constitute an investigative committee to establish the cause of the incident which later presented its findings to the Ministry of Energy.

But he said his outfit will this time around; rely solely on the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) for the findings on what actually transpired leading to the explosion.

“We’ll allow fire service to do since our expert opinions and that of other regulators will be sought”, he disclosed.

Mr Tampuli revealed that Mansco gas filling station was among 7 others within the nation’s capital that fell short of safety operation standards during an audit in April this year.

“First of all, we said there was too much activity on the forecourt especially around the cylinder filling and auto gas area. Secondly, more safety signs should be provided at the facility and thirdly, customers should be prevented from assessing the filling area, a separate waiting area must be provided,” he said.

According to him, one of the recommendations was to create a waiting area for customers separate from where the cylinders were refilled among others.

“In the case of this particular station, we did the monitoring and inspection in April 2017, so it was part of Greater Accra inspection and monitoring exercise. We wrote to them a letter which was sent to them on 10th of July. What the letter said was that we’ve done monitoring and inspection of your station and we come to the realization that they fell short of a number of things and we cataloged them.

One of the things we said was that their forecourt was too busy of activities which include taxi rank, food vendors among others. So we thought that, that was unsafe so they should put in place the necessary safety measures,” he disclosed.