Petrol station ships reopen after blast

Two months after a blast ripped through the underground reservoir at the Teyseer Al Hilal Petrol Station damaging shops and injuring scores, business has slowly resumed at the outlets on the premises.

“We were able to reopen the supermarket after nearly 20 days. The damage to the glass walls and the shop as a result of the blast was fixed thanks to the management.

Business has returned to normal since then,” one of the shopkeepers said yesterday.

“There was further delay because power supply to our shop was disrupted by the blast,” he added. More than 50 people were injured, seven of them seriously, when an underground fuel storage tank at the gas station exploded on October 14.

A bus carrying workers to a construction site bore the brunt of the blast as most of the casualties were passengers in the bus which was refuelling at the time of the early-morning incident.

“The intensity of the blast shattered the glass pane of our pharmacy. We were able to open two days later but only for a few hours a day for weeks,” the pharmacist at the medical shop on the premise, said.

“We returned to full business a couple of weeks later,” she added. Civil Defence officials, at the time, said there was a pressure build up in the underground fuel tank, which caused it to burst.

Over a dozen dispensers at the gas station, which suffered extensive damage, remain sealed to date but the car wash nearby, along with shops including juice stalls, an ice cream parlour, car accessories and mechanic’s garage were re-opened days after the incident.

Most of the injured were released the next day after the incident while only four were kept for screening, according to the Hamad Medical Corp.

Following the blast, an adhoc committee was set up, to work under Qatar Petroleum with members from the Ministry of Interior and other institutions, and tasked with examining the condition of old petrol stations and storage tanks.