Philippine
Daily Inquirer / 05:16 AM November 08, 2017
CITY OF CALAPAN — About
10 hectares of farmland and a creek in this city were damaged when oil leaked
from a tank in a power plant here during heavy rains on Monday.
In an interview on
Tuesday, Alfonso Javier, provincial environment management officer of the
Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) in Oriental Mindoro province, said the
leak had been contained about six hours later, through the use of booms and
absorbent pillows.
Faulty sensor
The spill came from the
buffer tank of DMCI Power Corp., which has been operating a 15-megawatt
bunker-fired diesel plant in Barangay Sta. Isabel for the last three years.
Personnel from the EMB
had collected samples of the sludge for analysis.
DMCI, in a statement,
said 800 liters of oil leaked from its tank yard at 3:30 a.m. on Monday due to
a faulty sensor in its buffer fuel tank.
“The said sensor failed
to stop the continuous transfer of fuel from the main storage tank to the
buffer tank, causing the latter to overflow,” the statement said.
Farmlands, waterway
“The continuous heavy
rains during the past days contributed to the strong outflow of water from the
plant, causing the leaked oil
to rapidly reach the surrounding creek and rice fields,” DMCI said.
to rapidly reach the surrounding creek and rice fields,” DMCI said.
Javier said the buffer
tank has a carrying capacity of 60,000 liters of fuel.
The spill was contained
around 9:30 a.m. Monday, although the sludge had already damaged around 10
hectares of farmland and a nearby creek.
“There were around 10 kilograms of dead crabs
recovered from a fishpond affected by the spill,” Javier said by telephone.
Javier said the EMB
found the company guilty of “negligence.” But he said DMCI agreed to compensate
the affected residents.
Improving protocols
DMCI said the company
was taking the incident “very seriously” as it continued its investigation.
“We are also improving
our protocols for calibrating all fuel sensors, and redesigning the existing
retaining wall around our oil storage containers to prevent a recurrence of
this incident,” it said. —Reports
from Madonna Virola and Maricar Cinco
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