Ceylon Today Editorial

MAKE IT EVEN

26 April 2017

For a brief, yet effective moment which lasted more than just a day, people of this country forgot that we were still in the fallout of yet another disaster made due to our own negligence and the myopic morals of our elected public representatives.

Sometimes, if you don't join the bandwagon, you simply cannot survive. Or rather, that's a common sentiment found in most Sri Lankans, including our politicians.

People who were concerned about those affected by the Meethotamulla disaster were quick to divert their attention to the next big political scandal that happens basically every other week in this country; in this case, it was the major petroleum distribution disruption due the trade union action organized by the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation.

When the Corporation announced that they would be going to walk out on a strike, closing all the fuel stations and depriving all consumers of fuel, the ability to transport and rather long lines waiting to get fuel from the small stations that are not participating in the strike, none of the politicians took it seriously.The trade union action itself was borderline blackmail and was unnecessary in the first place. The main reason the government leaders didn't take it seriously, we assume, was that fuel has become an essential product of survival and thought the Corporation would not see it through. Of course, they were proved wrong.

But unfortunately for Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC), the people whom they were protesting against – the Indians – were able to find profit from a single day due to the extended queues that thronged their fuel stations.

The Corporation was protesting against the government's decision to create a proposed joint venture between India and Sri Lanka to operate and manage oil storage tanks in Trincomalee. These oil storage tanks were built by the British in 1924 and completed in the 1930s.

The farm had 101 storage tanks built with 1 inch thick steel sheets and the tanks near the harbour are enclosed by one foot thick concrete rings. Legend has it that labourers were brought in from British African colonies to complete the work. 102 tanks were planned, but the site of 102nd tank was cleared, but never built probably out of superstition.

Each tank could hold 12,000 tonnes of fuel and has an astonishing total capacity of over 1.2 million tonnes. This dwarfs the CPC's existing storage facility and even the new storage complex built by the Chinese at Muthurajawela, which has a capacity of 200,000 tonnes.

The storage complex fell into disuse after the British ceded power in 1948 and nature took over the land. Out of the 101 tanks, one of the tanks was destroyed when a Royal Ceylon Air Force plane crashed in early 1960's. The steel has long since been removed with only the concrete cover remaining.

But the most famous is the number plate of tank No. 91 lying at the far edge of the forest.

Only the charred, twisted and melted metal remains of this tank and a small notice near the tank gives details of how the tank was destroyed in a Kamikaze attack during the Japanese air raid on Trincomalee at dawn on 9 April 1942.

The government-owned CPC used only 15 tanks in the lower tank farm close to the sea until the farm was handed over to the Indian oil giant, Indian Oil Corporation in 2002. The IOC too, used only these tanks while others were forgotten in the jungles.
Since then, the storage tanks have fallen into disuse, have become more of a remnant of the past, quickly being forgotten, than a part of a beneficial development project of the government.

Accordingly, the government has planned to reinvigorate the 2002 plan to lease a number of oil tanks to IOC in order to accrue somewhat of an income from a let-down and deteriorating edifice – which we see as a logical plan.

The initial draft was to allocate 14 tanks to the IOC, 10 for the CPC and 74 to be owned by a joint venture between the two governments. However, this is also what paved the way for the trade union action by the CPC, demanding that they should receive more tanks to be managed and operated. While this might seem a yet another selfish demand made by any selfish person, there seem to be some validity in the request. The government could reach a consensus and divide the number of tanks evenly between the IOC and the government owned CPC, so that it would be beneficial to both parties. There is no harm in a zero-sum game.

But in the end, what either government should remember is that this project is worth the effort of funding our tax money in heavy amounts. After all, we wouldn't want this project to flunk like all the other boasted development projects this country has seen.