It’s been more than a month since an explosion and fire at the Irving Oil Refinery terrified many people in the greater Saint John area. While the exact cause of the Oct. 8 incident isn’t known, there are calls for a more timely release of information to the public.
Very little has been shared with the general public in the weeks following the explosion. Irving Oil says it’s working with authorities to determine a cause of the incident in a diesel unit.
“We’ve got one of our division chiefs with a significant knowledge of fire investigation and one of our captains, so we’re part of that,” said Saint John Fire Department chief Kevin Clifford.
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As required the company did correspond with the Department of Environment with letters dated Oct. 9 and 12. The province shared those letters with Global News. The Oct. 12 letter indicates monitoring showed “no air quality concerns in the surrounding community,” and that the company was checking for the “presence of volatile organic compounds” surrounding the facility including the community.
In an email to Global News, the environment department says it is “satisfied with the mitigation and assessment efforts thus far.”
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But there are some who are clearly not satisfied.
“It’s been a whole month since we received any updated information so this does not meet public expectations,” said Gordon Dalzell, a local clean air advocate who lives in a neighbourhood near the refinery.
Dalzell is referring to a letter sent to refinery neighbours on Oct. 16. He says more information should be provided to those living near the refinery and the general public, regardless of how much or how little information is available.
“When you go through an experience like this the need for information is critically important because the more information you have the more easy it is for people to cope and understand and try to accept you know what happened,” he explained.
Dalzell says he has asked the refinery to publicly release two recent letters along with a preliminary report on the incident sent to the Minister of the Environment.
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Clifford says he wants transparency when it comes to explaining what happened and what can be learned.
“I think that’s the best way to gain the trust of our community,” he said
Clifford has admitted certain issues surrounding communications can be improved upon when it comes to dealing with the public during an emergency situation, especially when it comes to early communication to nearby neighbourhoods. He also shared a communications problem the city was dealing with earlier on the day of the explosion.
He says there was a planned power outage that day at city hall, but complications resulted in internal communications being impacted.
“So some of the things we felt around early communications and rallying our team were out of sync because what normally is our rallying mechanism, which is our internet, was all down.”
Clifford says the Saint John Fire Department is part of the active investigation with WorkSafeNB and “after incident reviews” with each of the department’s work platoons have recently been completed.