17 February 2014, Monrovia — For days, Monrovia and parts of Liberia have experienced a crisis that has resulted to darkness, further compounding the already lack of stable electricity power for Monrovia and immediate environs.
The current fuel crisis on the Liberian market is affecting the operations of many entities, including the Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC) which supplies state entities with electric power. Private generators operated on fuel have not been able to run the usual house, leaving several communities, homes, businesses and offices in darkness.
The Liberia Broadcasting System, the only state radio has gone off the air since Thursday and has been off until midday Sunday making it impossible for the Government to communicate with the Liberian public.
The Liberia Petroleum refining Company, responsible for storage of petroleum products blamed the situation on breakdown by its main supplier based in neighboring Ivory Coast.
Investigation has established that the situation is causing serious impediment to many entities with the crisis now taking a political dimension with a former head of the LPRC blaming the current management of the problem.
On Sunday, tankers were seen around the vicinity of the LPRC, offloading fuel, but it remains to see when major entities like the LEC and others will receive supply. T. Nelson Williams, Managing Director of the LPRC told FrontPageAfrica that the current supply being offloaded is a consignment of 2 million gallons of fuel.
Williams says major entities, including the LEC, hospitals, amongst others will receive first priority and during the course of today the fuel crisis will be resolved with supply available on the market.
Besides, the problem encountered with the supplier in the Ivory Coast, Williams also blames ongoing rehabilitation work at the company, which he said cannot allow for the storage of supply over a long period.
Williams says “Right now LPRC is going through a major rehabilitation and expansion project. If we had backup tanks at this time, we would have had at least two months supply; but based on the unavailability of storage capacity, we have the only capacity to have 1 1/2 tanks available for fuel. This problem will be resolved permanently at the conclusion of this project, which will be July 2015”.
– FrontPageAfrica