Can Pertamina be Called Negligent Regarding the Fire at the North Jakarta Plumpang Depot?

JAKARTA - Energy Economic Observer Fahmi Radhi firmly said Pertamina was negligent in maintaining the security of the Plumpang Depot, which caused a massive fire on Friday, March 3 evening. Moreover, this is not the first fire.

"Until now, (the cause of the fire) has not been found. From previous incidents, scapegoats have always been sought. For example, in 2011 it was caused by burning dry reeds. Now, I think this fire is very naive, there should be a security system that it is of international standard," Fahmi told VOI, Saturday, March 4.

Fahmi assessed that Pertamina had not learned from the previous fire incident, so the security system at the Plumpang depot escaped his supervision.

"It turns out that if you look at the successive fires at the refinery, now we have a depot (Plumpang) in a settlement, so actually Pertamina doesn't have a reliable security system, which could have prevented this big fire before it happened," he said.

With this incident, continued Fahmi, Pertamina also does not have its own fire extinguisher (damkar) to prevent a fire from growing at the scene.

Thus, the fire that appeared around the location began to spread to residential areas.

"Yes, it still needs investigation from the police, but the fires (occurring) have been repeated, whether the factory or the depot are always blamed for lightning, the problem is that there is no further investigation to find out what caused it so that in the future the fire will not happen again," said Fahmi.

"If the security system has an international standard, it (Pertamina) has an internal fire department, so when the fire starts it can be prevented, it doesn't quickly spread to residential areas," he added.

Therefore, said Fahmi, this incident had shown that Pertamina did not have firefighters internally earlier, so it could not minimize the fire incident last night.

"The fires that were hit by the wind earlier went everywhere, to people's homes too, because it was indeed at the Plumpang Depot, right, in the middle of a fairly densely populated area, so the firefighters themselves had difficulty getting into the (area) of the fire earlier, " he concluded.

The Pertamina Plumpang Depot fire post at Koramil 01/Koja corrected the death toll data. Originally there were 17 people, now there are 13 people.

Of the 13 victims, three of them were children. The victims who died as a result of the incident have been taken to the Kramat Jati Police Hospital, East Jakarta, to be identified.