Bye Bye BLEVE

The petrol kiosk (gas station) at the Golden Shoe Car Park--I have called it "the most dangerous place in Singapore"--pumped its last liter on Wednesday, May 2, 2007. As a contingency planner, I am delighted it closed. Common sense has prevailed, at last.

Golden Shoe Car Park contains eight floors of parking space for more than 1,000 vehicles, and is located in the heart of Singapore's Raffles Place financial district. When the parking lots are full (as it is most weekdays), and each parked vehicle has a 40 litre tank, the building would have 40,000 liters (about 10,000 gallons) of fuel waiting to be an ignition source.

Below the 1,000 vehicles, there are about 50 food stalls spread across two floors, where each stall is plumbed with LPG under pressure (see yellow pipes in photo on the left). That's more fuel waiting to be ignited. These remain in operation after the petrol station closed down.

The gas station was located on the ground below the food stalls and the vehicles level, had underground storage tanks and was open 24 hours a day. It had no automated fire suppression system--only the handheld extinguishers you see in the photo below.

In short, Golden Shoe was an enormous BLEVE waiting for a careless smoker to drop a cigarette in the wrong place, at the wrong time. (BLEVE refers to boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion)

The Singapore Land Authority did not renew the station's lease, and the building's owner CapitaLand plans to convert the space into more street-level shops, according to a story in local paper The Business Times.

The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) has instructed petroleum retailers in Singapore to close and relocate their stations that are located on the ground floors of commercial buildings. There were eight such stations in Singapore; four have since closed, and the four others will be closed when the sites are sold. New stations must be located 100 meters from residences and 50 meters from commercial areas.

SCDF has also ordered retail fuel operators to install remotely-activated anti-hijacking devices on their trucks to prevent the use of a loaded fuel tanker as truck bombs.

Lion City bankers will have to fill up their Beemers in the suburbs before they come to work from now on, but they'll all be safer at their desks during trading hours.