Durban – The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) has indicated that it did not want another Clairwood, and called for the expansion and conversion of the Engen refinery into a fuel-storage depot to be halted.
As a result, Durban residents are to stage a picket on Wednesday, June 15, 2022, between 9.30am to 10.30am, at the Engen depot on Tara Road to highlight their concerns about the conversion of the Engen refinery into a fuel-storage depot, and the lack of a much-needed just transition for workers and the community.
SDCEA said Engen was one of the worst corporate citizens in South Africa – a mainly Malaysian-owned firm “whose local black economic empowerment tycoon, Phuthuma Nhleko, has consistently disempowered their black neighbourhoods”.
Nhleko is also the main partner of the French oil company Total in offshore gas drilling at Brulpadda and Luiperd, and not only does he apparently “care nothing for the local pollution he and the Malaysians have heaped upon us… He also is hell-bent on increasing methane pollution from gas deposits, in spite of CH4 being 85 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2”.
“We recall with fury the countless Engen explosions, leaks and terrible SO2 smells and heavy metal emissions (such as cancer-causing benzene), culminating in an explosion on December 4, 2020 at the refinery, which proved too expensive to fix. But now the old rust-bucket refinery is being repurposed as a fuel/oil storage site,” said SDCEA’s Desmond D’Sa.
He said that since 1998, when South Durban’s Strategic Environmental Assessment was conducted, Engen seemed to believe its future was to creep, crawl and thereby steal the land on which our Wentworth and Merebank communities are located. You’ll recall that we were relocated from other areas of Durban, including Cato Manor, due to apartheid segregation policies. Engen heaps insult upon insult, making profits off of our suffering whether under racial apartheid or post-apartheid environmental injustice.
“We, as the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) and south Durban communities, stand together against the repurposing and oil-storage expansion of Engen. We have health concerns, due to the massive increase in truck traffic that is anticipated, and ongoing damage that such fossil fuels do to our planet,” D’Sa said.
“We see our area under threat, yet again, the way our neighbours to the north in Clairwood residential area are. There, too, it started with trucks springing up overnight next to homes. We have heard that an increase in fuel storage at Engen could result in some 2 000 hazardous tankers on our residential roads in Merebank and Wentworth.”
D’Sa added that with the conversion of the refinery into storage facilities, instead of a full-fledged just transition detox of the vast refinery complex area, they anticipate more fossil-fuel mishaps, leaks and explosions, resulting in yet more cancer and leukaemia in Merebank, Wentworth, the Bluff, Treasure Beach and Lamontville.
“The likely increase in hazardous oil tankers on our roads would affect pupils, educators, and workers coming in and going out of the area, as well as our residents,” D’Sa said.
“We have witnessed many truck accidents on our roads, with hundreds of trucks blocking community roads in this area due to Transnet’s freight ‘road to rail’ mismanagement.”
D’Sa encouraged communities that will be affected to come out in their numbers to join the picket.
Daily News