Faced with Singapore's largest refinery fire in over 20 years, Shell leapt to action to deal with crisis
Robin Chan Straits Times 9 Oct 11;
For 32 hours last month, Singaporeans watched with rapt attention as a fire burned on an island 5km off the southern shore of Singapore.
While firefighters battled to contain the conflagration at Shell's Pulau Bukom refinery, an eight-man strong crisis team huddled inside a room at Shell's headquarters on 83 Clemenceau Avenue, miles away from the action.
Heading this team was Mr Lee Tzu Yang, the 56-year-old chairman of Shell companies in Singapore.
For the man facing the largest refinery fire in Singapore for more than 20 years, the pressure was on.
There was a hint of irony too in the situation - Mr Lee is also the chairman of Singapore's Workplace Safety and Health Council. But if the heat was on him, one would have been hard-pressed to see it.
Shell's response to the crisis turned out to be so slick and well-oiled that Mr Lee said he did not have trouble sleeping about four or five hours each night, and did not even need to set foot on the island until the fire went out on Sept 29.
Speaking to The Sunday Times in an exclusive interview eight days after the incident, Mr Lee - dressed in a navy blue protective jumpsuit (known as personal protective equipment) on his way to Pulau Bukom - cut a cool figure as he shared his thoughts on his 'most challenging' battle with safety since joining the oil giant in 1979.
It started with a phone call at about 1.45pm on Sept 28.
On the line was Mr Martijn van Koten, vice-president for Shell's manufacturing operations, who said a fire had broken out at Pump House 43 - an area containing an intimidating network of pipes carrying gasoline, kerosene and other expensive refined oil products.
That first conversation was deliberately short.
'In a fire, the protocol is to let the folk at the fire fight the fire and not burden them with questions. Because that's not going to help them,' Mr Lee said.
Forty-five minutes later, he got another call telling him that the fire was being contained by Shell's own 40-man strong firefighting team, which was eventually boosted by some 100 personnel from the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF).
At the site, safety mechanisms had also clicked into place.
First, automatic pumps were activated, spreading foam on the fire.
A drainage system around the pump house area also kicked into gear, pumping any run-off liquids out, away from the fire and pipes.
The fact that all these systems worked was a big relief for Shell, and they played a significant part in helping to keep the gigantic inferno to a contained area measuring 176m by 65m.
'These systems are designed for that purpose, but they may not be designed for that amount,' Mr Lee said.
'So we needed to make sure we could handle the volumes of foam, water and hydrocarbons that came through. And it worked, so that was another confidence-builder.'
Meanwhile floating barriers called 'booms' had also been put out as a precautionary measure, along with a boat that kept watch in case any of the chemicals spilled into the sea. But that did not happen.
Firefighting in the office
Mr Dai Nguyen, Shell's health, safety and environment manager, was attending a course on nearby Jurong Island when he heard about the fire through an automated emergency call-out message.
He could already see the huge plumes of smoke from where he was and, as he was a key member of the Emergency Response Team, he rushed back to Bukom to coordinate the site response and link up with the SCDF.
The cool and systematic approach to dealing with the fire came as no surprise to the thousands of staff and contractors who commute to Bukom each day.
Pulau Bukom, a 1.45 sq km mass of land that Shell has occupied since 1891, has 12 islandwide drills a year that specifically include firefighting, and contacting the SCDF in emergencies.
As luck would have it, its most recent exercise last month was its one annual joint exercise with the SCDF.
'These are the sort of things you thank God for after the event, that you have actually practised,' said Mr Lee, a father of three.
The SCDF came well-prepared too, so much so that piles of extra equipment, such as pumps and foam tenders, lined Pasir Panjang ferry terminal.
'They prudently over-responded,' said Mr Lee, smiling. 'You can laugh at it, but at the time, it was a great source of comfort.'
After receiving the second phone call at 2.30pm, there was radio silence from Bukom over the next few hours. Mr Lee hoped that meant the fire was being put out.
But instead he got shocking news that there had been a violent surge at around 6.30pm which damaged three fire trucks.
That was when Mr Lee declared a crisis in order to get more help, and formed a crisis management team at Shell House.
'I activated the office-based staff to start bringing them in and thought, 'OK, this is going to be a long night,'' he said.
'It was not just the people at the site who now needed to be fighting the fire, we needed to, as a company, think about what this might mean.'
Among the team were people in charge of Shell's manufacturing, supply, communications and human resources, and also an overall co-coordinator who would act as Mr Lee's back-up.
By then, Mr Lee had already made a phone call to Shell global chief executive Peter Voser in the Netherlands, who had offered words of support and asked Mr Lee to make sure that no one was being 'overstretched'. Mistakes happen in such circumstances, he had said.
But the more difficult conversation with Mr Voser came a day later, after a second violent surge in the middle of the day dented the spirits of the Shell and SCDF people.
'To have had not one, but two surges, that was quite worrying,' Mr Lee said.
'Some of our people had already been working for 20 to 30 hours straight. So we started to put on shifts and to find alternates. We started to say: 'Okay if this were to take a week, do we have the resources?''
Emerging from trial by fire
As the hours wore on and the fire continued to burn, the weariness and worry started to be clearly apparent on the faces of Shell and SCDF staff at their second media briefing at a temporary tactical HQ at the Pasir Panjang ferry terminal on the night of Sept 29.
The SCDF said it had never seen this kind of a fire, described later as 'complex and multi-dimensional'. And even Shell's experts could not figure out what was actually feeding the fire from the myriad pipelines.
They had decided to fly in Shell's global health, safety and environment consultant Evert Jonker to provide more help.
A weary Mr Lee headed back to the office, planning for another long day of crisis management.
But, just as unexpectedly as he had found out about the fire, he got a call telling him that it had finally been put out, 32 hours after it began.
Looking back, a stoic Mr Lee said he was just relieved that the fire was not bigger, and that no one was seriously injured.
'Fire is one of the things we fear the most and we are most loath to have because hydrocarbons and fire don't mix,' he said.
That the situation did not play out worse had much to do with training and rehearsing, he firmly believes.
'We are in an industry where the implications of taking your eye off the ball are horrendous, so we take safety very seriously in my company,' said Mr Lee.
'We train and train our people. And we tell them this is what we need to do, this is what we need to be ready for. And that even if this happens once every 20 to 25 years, one incident can wipe you out.
'I am still very, very interested in what caused the fire, because that's the other side of the safety angle that we need to pay attention to, but I'm very glad that on this side, we were able to protect people.'
The refinery on Bukom has now reached a stable and safe state, said Mr Lee, after it had been progressively shut down since the start of the fire.
With a key hydrocracker unit shut and others operating at low throughput, the challenge now is to find a way to supply customers with the petrochemical products they had ordered.
A dedicated safety study has been performed for all units adjacent to the incident site, which has confirmed that they are not damaged.
'We can confirm that some operations have continued and some operations will resume at the site but we are unable to comment on operational specifics,' he said.
Shell is now looking at re-connecting the network of lines within the refinery to start up operations without the damaged areas, which are currently under investigation by the Ministry of Manpower and SCDF.
One bone of contention that Shell has had to deal with is the concept of force majeure, which means the company is freed from contractual obligations in the event of extraordinary circumstances.
Although the company declared force majeure on some of its contracts, it does not mean Shell would be walking away from its obligations to its customers.
'It does not imply automatic cessation of supply or even reduction,' said Mr Lee. 'It basically gives notice that the circumstance agreed between buyer and seller in the contract has happened, so we need to re-think and follow the clause.
'We have been in Singapore for 120 years. We wouldn't be here if we didn't take our customers and our obligations seriously.'
Rising from the ashes
After any crisis, it is common for someone at the top to take the blame. But Mr Lee said he has no plans to resign and never felt any pressure to do so over the fire.
'Do I feel personally responsible? There is certainly a sense of responsibility,' he said.
'But I need to understand what I could have done better and I think I rely on the investigation to do that.'
He does let on, however, that he has been turning over in his mind things he could have done 'over the last three years, five years, or 10 years' that could have made a difference in preventing the fire from starting in the first place, or that could have made his people even better prepared.
But that reflection will have to come at a later time.
'My responsibility now is to make sure the company is brought together during this difficult period, make sure the co-operation with the public services goes on well, that the recovery for our customers is well managed and then let the investigation come up with its recommendations,' added Mr Lee.
Shell will go through an internal process of what he called 'causal learning' - looking back at each action that led to the fire 'almost to the point of absurdity'.
'You go back to not only what created the spark, but also what created the atmosphere around it. Was there deficiency in training? Were there things that we could have done differently?'
Before he left to catch his ferry to Bukom, Mr Lee could not help but warn Singaporeans not to be alarmed when Shell eventually starts up its refinery fully again.
'In a start up or shut down, you will always see a bigger flame!' he quipped.
'We don't want the public in Singapore to believe that this is any problem, this is entirely normal. And it is safer to have a bit of a flame than not to have it.'
A fire which is better than no fire? For Shell, clearly not all fires are so bad after all.
Background story
Shell chairman takes leave from workplace safety council
Shell Singapore chairman Lee Tzu Yang, who also helms the Workplace Safety and Health Council, took a temporary leave of absence from the industry body last Monday.
He told The Sunday Times that the move was to avoid any conflicts of interest as the inquiry into the cause of the Pulau Bukom fire gets under way.
'I wanted to make absolutely clear from the beginning that I do not seek to, and will not, have any influence whatsoever on the investigation, and Shell will fully cooperate,' said Mr Lee.
'This leave of absence will also enable me to better focus on Shell's recovery efforts.'
The blaze, which engulfed a pump house at the oil giant's half-a-million barrel-a-day refinery on Pulau Bukom, burned for 32 hours two weeks ago. As a result, parts of the refinery - Shell's largest in the world - have been temporarily shut down.
Investigations by the Ministry of Manpower and Singapore Civil Defence Force are still ongoing.
Mr Lee said he is confident Shell will take the lessons learnt from the fire in its stride and be the better for it.
'Safety is too important for us to shrink from the responsibility to make this message heard,' he said. 'If we do not step up to this, we will not succeed in making Singapore a leader for safety and health in the workplace.'
The 18-member council was established in 2008 to help raise workplace safety and health standards among local industry players.
The Manpower Ministry said yesterday that Maritime Sustainability chief executive Heng Chiang Gnee will be acting chairman of the council.
Robin Chan
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