FPIC’s version of the West Tower disaster
We received a reaction from Anthony M. Mabasa, president and COO of First Philippine Industrial Corp. (FPIC), to our Aug. 11 column on the situation at the West Tower condominium, whose basement had been flooded with a mixture of water and fuel leaking from FPIC’s pipeline and soaking the soil in Barangay Bangkal in Makati. FPIC is the owner of the pipeline that runs from the oil refineries in Batangas to the fuel depot in Pandacan. The leak had made West Tower inhabitable because of the gas fumes and the danger of fire, and the condominium residents were forced to leave their homes. They now live with relatives or are renting rooms elsewhere. Some of them came to see me and provided me with the basis for my column.
In his letter, Mabasa said that the column has “certain erroneous statements which we think may have been a result of serious misrepresentations by a few.” In the interest of truth and fairness, we are reproducing here Mabasa’s letter.
Mabasa said that I wrote that the “impression given in the media is that the leaks have been stopped, that the spilled fuel has been removed, and that West Tower is now habitable. All wrong.”
“FPIC,” he said in his reaction, “has repaired the breach in its pipeline in November 2010 yet and there were no other leaks found on the pipeline. It is not true, however, that FPIC declared that the residents can now return to West Tower. We have not compelled any resident to return to the building. We have said before that it would be the appropriate government authority which will declare the building acceptable for the return of the residents. As will be explained below, the rehabilitation is still ongoing, although the sole breach in the pipeline has been addressed.
“The design of the West Tower building is such that it naturally takes in water at the basement and this is subsequently pumped out. “Apparently, its design engineers chose to relieve the hydrostatic pressure coming from the high water level outside by deliberately taking in water to the sump pit and pumping it out to the sewers, instead of building thicker concrete walls in its basement.
“After West Tower was issued a cease and desist order by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources for its own pumping operation, FPIC took over the pumping and hauling of wastewater in the basement in March 2011. FPIC’s contractors have completely de-watered the basement by April 2011. Since then, FPIC and its contractors have continued to work non-stop in taking and treating the wastewater which still seeps into the sump pit and through the cracks in the wall that pre-date the incident. Our water treatment contractors and our technical team estimate the hydrocarbon content of this waste-
water has gone down to about only one percent (1%). Meanwhile, the rehabilitation in the affected areas in the building is still ongoing. This includes the cleaning up of the basement and replacement/repair of damaged equipment and sealing of cracks.
“Second, we would also like to address the statement that it would ‘take three to five years to remove the free-floating fuel from the basement and another 5 to 10 years to bring back the soil to their original condition.’
“The rehabilitation of West Tower is a separate activity from remediation of the environment. Our consultants have devised a plan whereby while the building is undergoing rehabilitation, which we hope to complete within the year, the remediation outside West Tower, within the areas covered by the plume, can continue for a period of 3 to 5 years, with West Tower and the community going about their daily lives with minimum hindrance from the remediation activities. It is important to note that even without any order from the courts, FPIC, on its own initiative, committed to address the consequence of the seepage, as indeed it is now doing so.
“Third, we would also like to correct the statement that ‘the 40-year-old FPIC pipes, through which fuel flows from the Batangas refineries to the Pandacan oil depot, have been slowly leaking for years.’
“In the 43 years that the pipeline has been operating, this is the first isolated incident of its kind to occur and the cause is still undetermined. It is important to point out, however, that when reports first came to FPIC’s attention about the petroleum seepage into the West Tower, FPIC undertook the necessary measures with the required due diligence to locate it. In November 2010, FPIC located the breach in the pipeline and the breach was repaired within three days from discovery.
“Fourth, with respect to the statement that Judge Eugene Paras of the Makati RTC was ‘driven back by the fumes’ when he conducted an ocular inspection, please be clarified that Judge Paras inspected the basement levels 1 to 3 as well as the other areas of the building, including the ground floor lobby, the 11th floor and the roofdeck. We have acknowledged that earlier, one would not be able to go down to the basement unless he wore a face mask.
“Fifth, it is not true that FPIC is issuing ‘glowing reports’ on its remediation activities and saying FPIC ‘is ahead of schedule, when in fact it (remediation) has not started.’
“As a show of transparency and good faith, FPIC regularly gives updates on its remediation activities to the City Government of Makati, the Inter-Agency Committee on Environmental Health, and the barangay. Since the company has ceased operating the white pipeline on Oct. 27, 2010 and prior to the issuance of the Writ of Kalikasan, FPIC focused its efforts in recovering the product which leaked into the ground.” (To be continued)
