Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell has laid the blame on state-owned Gravel & Concrete for Tuesday’s massive explosion at the Telescope quarry area in St Andrew South-east that left over 16 houses and several vehicles damaged and four persons hospitalized with minor injuries.
Addressing a Town Hall meeting in St Patrick on Wednesday night, the Prime Minister made it clear that the Corporation will have to foot the bill to cover the cost of all the damages including the injury to one of its own employees who suffered damage to his two ear drums from the loud blast.
“There is no doubt and I’m making it public that the Gravel & Concrete Corporation is responsible for the consequences of the unfortunate and regrettable detonation,” the Grenadian leader told a large gathering at the Town Hall meeting.
He was firm in stating that for those people who suffered losses and damage as a result of the incident, Gravel & Concrete Corporation will have to make good to them.
PM Dickon Mitchell gave assurances that the government will work with the state body to make sure that they would move as quickly as possible “to deploy the necessary resources to be able to minimise inconvenience or disruption to the persons.”
He also said that a hotline would be set up at Gravel & Concrete to speed up the process of sorting out the affected persons.
In giving the background to the incident, the Prime Minister stated that Gravel & Concrete had some aged explosives that were previously used for blasting at the Telescope Quarry in St Andrew South-east stored on the compound of the Special Services Unit (SSU) at Point Salines for some years.
“It was obvious that the Ordnances because of the long period of storage and the conditions in which they were stored needed to be destroyed because they were becoming unstable and unstable ordnances are prone to explode,” he said.
According to PM Dickon Mitchell, the Commissioner of Police Randy Connaught and the Police Force granted Gravel & Concrete permission to destroy the Ordnances.
“…The decision to destroy the ordnances (was) a sound one based on the need to ensure that there were no unintended explosions at Point Salines.”
The prized Maurice Bishop International Airport (MBIA) is located within a one mile radius of the SSU Camp.
The Prime Minister told the Town Hall meeting that the Telescope Quarry under the control of Gravel & Concrete was chosen as the site to do the destruction and one of its employees was put in charge of the operation.
“Without giving details, the reports indicate that the process chosen to destroy the Ordnances was not prudent and was not in-keeping with the best practices”, he said.
He pointed out that the explosion was heard as far away as Hermitage in St Patrick and that the blast caused tremendous damage to the Gravel & Concrete building at Telescope, the police vehicle on the compound that was used to escort the Ordnances from the SSU Camp, as well as persons living within close proximity to the quarry.
Four persons were hospitalised at the Princess Alice hospital in Mirabeau but subsequently discharged including the police officer who was on the scene.
According to the Prime Minister the blast resulted in significant craters being created on the grounds of the quarry, as well as damage to properties in Telescope itself as well as far away as Grenville and Soubise where the glass on windows and doors were shattered.
The Grenadian leader disclosed that not all of the explosives were detonated Tuesday and he would give instructions to the Commissioner of Police to take over the destruction of the remaining ordnances to make sure that “it is done in as safe a manner as possible to minimise any unfortunate occurrences of that nature.”
An official of Gravel & Concrete told THE NEW TODAY the state body did approach the police for permission to destroy the Ordnances because they were there for a long time and got wet in the container that they were stored in on the SSU compound.
He said that after permission was given by the Royal Grenada Police Force (RGPF), the person used as the Blaster by Gravel & Concrete over the years was contacted to conduct the operation of burning it.
“What we did – we cut the Pudding (Ordnance) – they split it through. They put everything in one area. It was piled up. I don’t know what go on there. Normally the pudding (Ordnance) does not cause no explosion. I don’t know if they had put a charge in one of the caps that is the detonator.”
“It must have a detonator in order for it to explode. So I don’t know if it’s what happened there and they didn’t see that.”
According to the company official, ten detonators were known to be at the Quarry site at the time of the massive explosion.
“The police are always there. You must have a police presence there – we just can’t go and do that on our own. We must get the police to accompany us and to definitely give us guidance and things like that, especially the Licensed Blaster.”
The company official is still at a loss as to what happened because the operation to be conducted is considered not a very difficult undertaking to carry out.
“I still don’t understand – that is something you could just burn. You cut the grass and you spread it on the ground and you cut the pudding (Ordnance) and you spread it on the grass and then it just burns easy.”
“After the guys and them light the pudding (Ordnance) on the other side of the building, they went down by the sea to get rid of the detonators. They did get rid of the detonators but the explosion happened after they got rid of the detonators.
“It is quite possible that it had one somewhere around the Pudding (Ordnance). That is my only suspicion – for this explosion to be so huge something must escape there.”
“It is something that we are accustomed to doing but unfortunately something (went) wrong there because as long as it has a detonator in it, it will explode. So that was an unfortunate situation.
The company official told THE NEW TODAY that the state body is committed to taking care of the affected persons before attending to its own building and its damaged vehicle.
“We want to take care of the people first before we do the in-house work. We want to take care of these people first because we have to make sure that these people get back to normalcy and then we would look internally,” he said.
