We’ll sue operator, regulators over La gas explosion – COPEC-GH

The Executive Secretary of the Chamber of Petroleum Consumers(COPEC-GH), Duncan Amoah has said his outfit will drag to court the operator or any of the regulators found culpable of shirking its responsibility that led to the Trade Fair Gas Explosion.

According to him, the critical actors in these sector would have saved the unsuspecting Ghanaians from dying in the accident, if they had kept an effective monitoring system.

Mr. Amoah argued that the safety of citizen would be largely compromised, if the state institutions tasked to ensure routine checks neglect their responsibilities.

“It is sad, cruel, avoidable. We saw June 3. If you’ll recall just the anniversary gone by this June 3rd, we all came together to agree with City Authorities, the NPA , the EPA to say Never Again! would we allow this catastrophe to befall Ghanaians again. Unfortunately however we seem not to have learnt much lessons from the June 3 disaster. We are quiet sad that we seem not to be doing much in that regard although the state has entrusted those responsibility to the NPA to ensure that fuel station and gas station have some safety standard minimum that they operate beyond which there should be closure. Do we think if the NPA continue to shirk its responsibility then the public safety indeed will continue to be compromised. And this is one of the issues we are seeing.

“We have said and will put on record that we are demanding from the Ghana Fire Service and the Police Service that whatever report on what led to this catastrophe leading to loss of lives, we’ll need that report immediately and we will haul before court any person found to have been negligent of a statutory duty or a personal duty for not having done so, we are willing to take some of these persons to court at least for once so that it will serve as a deterrent to others.”

Official figures put the death toll of persons at the Trade Fair gas explosion at 9 while 27 persons have suffered various degrees of burn injuries.

The incident occurred on Thursday evening at about 6 pm when residents around the area heard a loud bang and ran out to safety only to notice that the gas station was up in flames

Properties estimated to be running into several thousands of cedis were lost to the inferno.



It took personnel of the Ghana National Fire Service several hours to douse the inferno in order to save the injured persons who were later rushed to various health facilities in the capital.



The charred body of the deceased persons have also been deposited at morgues of a number of health facilities in Accra.