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City Council Member Warns Of 'Worse Disaster Than Beirut' Threatening Iran's Capital


Shahran oil depot in northwest Tehran
Shahran oil depot in northwest Tehran

A member of Tehran City Council on Thursday said an oil depo in the north of the capital Tehran may cause a disaster worse than the explosion in Beirut.

In an Instagram post on Thursday, Majid Farahani said lessons should be learned from the blast of neglectfully stored chemicals in Beirut on Tuesday.

The blast of the chemicals stored unsafely that killed at least 137 and wounded thousands caused massive destruction in the Lebanese capital. Farahani warned about similarly stored highly flammable chemicals in storage facilities in various ports and in cities around the country.

The member of Tehran City council warned particularly about an oil depot in Shahran in the northwest of the capital and pointed out that the facility is situated on a seismic fault line. He called the facility a "hydrogen bomb" threatening the lives of the residents every day.

The Shahran facility was built in 1974 outside the city boundaries but the area has been developed into a densely populated residential area in the past twenty years.

"The depo with its huge tanks is right in the middle of a residential district and around 300 tankers each with a capacity of 30,000 liters deliver the fuel from the depot through residential streets to get to the highway," he said and pointed out that in the past fifteen years several fuel tankers have had accidents causing panic among residents.

According to Farahani, an accident involving only one tanker or delivery vehicle during loading of the fuel may cause a fire that can ignite all the storage tanks one after the other and cause "a bigger disaster than Beirut in Tehran".

"Shahran faces danger 300 times a day and nobody is paying any attention," he warned and said removing chemical storage facilities such as the oil depo in Shahran should be considered as a national demand and priority now.

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