Early morning accounts on Sunday of a leak in an oil pipeline passing through the heart of the city turned out to be false as pipeline engineers from Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) discovered nothing other than dry earth and soggy bitumen after digging up the spot, near Kadavanthara on SA Road, from where a black oil-like substance was reportedly oozing out.
Sample collected
The engineers, who intervened on a request from the Mayor of the Kochi Corporation to examine the spot, said they took a sample of the soil that was dug up to test and identify the substance, which was reportedly oozing out according to eyewitnesses.
They gave up after nearly an hour of efforts, refilled the pit and decided to wait and watch. “We were alarmed by morning reports of an oil leak,” they said.
There is an oil pipeline passing through the BPCL refinery at Ambalamugal from Kochi port.
The digging up on the busy SA Road attracted a lot of public attention and a fairly large crowd gathered around the spot, with some of the local residents saying that there was an old pipeline passing through the spot but that it was scrapped nearly two decades ago.
Engineers from the refinery later confirmed this.
Initially there was a lot of confusion over the news of an oil leak as none of the three oil marketing companies said they had a pipeline passing through the spot under focus.
In fact, there is no pipeline in commission that passes through the spot and it is now believed that the oil that was apparently oozing out of the spot must have been only surface oil, the result of a possible spill.
