What Jakarta citizens feared came true Sunday night: The North Jakarta’s Pertamina Plumpang depot with 27 storage tanks was set ablaze!
It was lucky that only one of the storage tanks, tank no. 24 with a capacity of 5,000 kiloliters of premium, caught fire. Official statements said that the storage tank was not full when the fire started. However, early calculations have revealed that the fire inflicted a Rp 22.5 billion loss of state funds.
Speculation looms as firefighters found it difficult to extinguish the fire.
Fire, which broke out at 9:20 p.m. Sunday looked untamed until 6 a.m. Monday.
As police have yet to determine the cause of the fire, many Jakartans seem to believe that the fire was linked to the sabotage plan aborted last year. A man was arrested when found with explosives at his house in Rawa Sengon, only one kilometer away from the Plumpang depot.
The man admitted that his plan was in relation to the executions of the three Bali bombers.
The bombers had yet to be executed when the man was apprehended.
The findings made Jakartans terrified, imagining what would happen if the Plumpang depot, which supplies some 15,000 kiloliters of fuel to Greater Jakarta areas every day, was
set ablaze.
If the speculation was true, fingers would be pointed at Pertamina itself for shabby internal security. Jakarta police would also be responsible for failing to help Pertamina improve and retain a high standard of security, given that the depot had become a target of destruction.
If the speculation was not true, fingers would also be pointed at Pertamina management because human error must be blamed for the fire, meaning sloppiness, which suggests violations against the standing operating procedures were committed internally.
Eyewitnesses said that explosions took place about one hour before fire started to rage at the storage tank. Residents said that they saw no one take any action after the explosions until firefighters arrived about five minutes later.
It was very strange that water was used to extinguish the fire. Does this mean that Pertamina does not have fire trucks with special chemical foam available at the vicinity? The internal security system, including a precaution system and first-thing-first-step system did not seem to work in such a situation.
When I was a child I was told by my Boy Scout instructor not to use water to deal with fire that was caused by fuel. From this aspect, the firefighting method applied for the Plumpang fire was inappropriate. Chemical foam should have been used instead of water, which only managed to prevent the fire from spreading to other tanks and surrounding objects.
High-level systems with layers of security checks should have been applied to strategic installations like the Plumpang fuel depot.
We in Indonesia have experience of security systems, even for vital installations, that are frequently lax, with security guards too lenient on people they believe to be safe for various reasons, which is not good security procedure.
Security is usually tightened after a bomb hoax or other criminal acts, but improper habits resume soon if nothing else happens.
Many people may agree that the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport is one of the vital installations with a poor external and internal security system. Security is very poor especially at night when security guards never control incoming vehicles. “I could have brought a bomb, the security system is that poor,” the driver of a premium sedan said.
Now that Plumpang fuel depot’s internal security has been deemed unsuitable to deal with fire at the early stage, people are starting to focus on the location of the depot, which is too close to residential areas. For the sake of security, for both the depot and the residents, residents’ houses should be at least 500 meters away from the depot.
Let us give the police time to investigate the tragedy, hoping that Pertamina admits and is willing to review its weaknesses in preventive security systems when it comes to fire. Let us learn from the mistakes as the damage has been done. It is the time for introspection not self-defense.
The writer is a journalist.
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