Shahran oil depot: a potential bomb in a residential area
The Shahran Oil Warehouse is a storage facility for millions of liters of fuel in a neighborhood in northwest Tehran. The head of the Tehran City Council's budget committee says any accident at the warehouse could create a disaster worse than Beirut in a residential area.
The Shahran neighborhood in northwest Tehran is home to oil storage and millions of liters of fuel. It is a residential neighborhood whose population density is increasing every day due to its pleasant climate.
Majid Farahani, head of the Tehran City Council's budget committee, considers the neighborhood's oil depot to be like a "hydrogen bomb" and has called for the high-risk facility to be removed from Tehran.
Shahran is located in the fifth district of Tehran, in the northwest of the city, adjacent to Sulqan and Kan. Shahran's oil depot and huge fuel tanks were built in 1974, at a time when this neighborhood was uninhabited and deserted. Now, with the expansion of the neighborhood, at least 300 30,000-liter tankers pass through the back alleys of Shahran every day, with all the possible dangers.
Majid Farahani says: "All it takes is for one of the tankers or the vehicle carrying it to have an accident while refueling next to the tanks, and then a serial explosion of fuel tanks one after another will cause a disaster greater than Beirut in Tehran."
Emphasizing the need to learn from the Beirut explosion and the negligence in observing chemical storage protocols, Farahani wrote on Instagram: "Surely, warehouses similar to the Beirut chemical warehouse will be found in all corners of official customs or unofficial docks, in special economic zones, or in coastal and non-coastal ports of the country, which should henceforth be viewed as a time bomb; but in addition to the aforementioned places, the accumulation of chemicals in the heart and center of cities and residential areas is more dangerous."
He suggests that high-risk areas in Tehran and other cities be identified and that the government and city administration plan for "the possibility of a disaster and the release of these time bombs."
Warehouse on the Masha Fault
Two years ago, the Tehran City Council was supposed to follow up on a plan to build a dedicated route for tanker traffic in Shahran and hold a meeting with representatives of the Ministry of Petroleum, the Tehran Oil Refinery, officials from the Shahran oil depot, and other relevant officials, but the plan remained fruitless.
A member of the Tehran City Council, explaining the dangers of the Shahran oil depot, writes: "The Shahran neighborhood oil depot is like a hydrogen bomb inside the city, built on the Masha earthquake fault and in the heart of residential areas. Every day, 300 tankers are loaded from its supertankers and enter the highways by passing through residential areas."
In the past 14 years, four times gasoline tankers have overturned or crashed on city streets. In two cases, gasoline spilled onto green spaces, drying out trees forever.
The head of the Tehran City Council's budget committee also points to the danger of the city's oil depot being located on the "Mesha Fault" and believes that the casualties from the depot explosion in the event of a devastating earthquake would be greater than the earthquake itself.
The recent earthquakes in Tehran and Damavand in May and June were caused by the activation of the Mesha fault. Earthquake expert Mehdi Zare previously said that around 500,000 people live within less than 10 kilometers of the eastern and central segment of the Mesha fault, and in the event of an earthquake, taking into account the 15-20 kilometer distance from the fault, about seven million people would be affected.
The head of the Tehran City Council's budget committee has called the removal of oil storage facilities from cities a national demand.
Source: DW
