These risk revisions to the latest EIA studies have come to light amid heightened public awareness of gas explosions triggered by the recent Boksburg tanker disaster.
Karpowership consultants have made further last-minute changes to an environmental impact assessment (EIA) study, the effect of which is to reduce the predicted negative effects of the Turkish floating powerships plan.
Some alterations came to light last month when Our Burning Planet uncovered several inconsistencies between a new fire and explosions risk study for the powerships and a previous version published more than a year ago. These changes have largely been attributed to “software updates” in the computer models used to predict death and casualty risks should a major gas fire or explosion break out on Karpowership vessels anchored in the ports of Richards Bay, Ngqura or Saldanha Bay.
These belated explosion risk revisions come at a time of heightened public awareness around gas explosions following the devastating Boksburg disaster that killed 37 people after an LPG road tanker explosion on Christmas Eve.
Now, other observers have also picked up further revisions to some of the latest EIA studies – including “dramatic” reductions in the noise levels predicted to be generated by powerships over the next 20 years.
Some of these late changes to the original EIA noise studies have been attributed to “new information” emerging from Karpowership and other sources about ship structure and the silencing equipment fitted to the Turkish vessels.
Read in Daily Maverick: “Karpowership’s environmental hazards controversially reduced in new EIA specs”
After years of controversy, a final EIA report is due to be published later this month and then resubmitted for approval to the Department of Environmental Affairs, which rejected the first Karpowership EIA in 2021 on the basis that it was flawed and inadequate in several respects.
Last month, Our Burning Planet undertook a detailed line-by-line comparison of a major hazard risk assessment by Karpowership’s Cape Town risk consultant Claude Thackwray. Significantly, we found numerous changes to the studies he published in February 2021 and November 2022.
In his revised study, Thackwray has reduced the predicted fatality distance of a transfer hose flash fire from 879m to 499m. Fatal impacts due to a jet fire dropped from 568m to 188m, while in another Karpowership gas fire scenario, the lethal impact distance dropped from 220m to just 15m.
At the time, Thackwray attributed these changes to software updates to the computer risk modelling tools he uses. But we noticed ...