Anisul Islam Noor :
CNG run vehicles running in the capital and across the country may cause serious explosion, as 80 percent of the vehicles are operating without scheduled CNG cylinder integrity check up, concern official said.
Experts state that these expired CNG cylinders are like time bombs. These can be sources of death, injury and monetary losses of both owners and the passengers of the vehicle.
They asked the government to take strict initiative for checking of CNG cylinders immediately and mandatory sticker on each CNG run vehicle with the date of cylinder check up to avert massive casualties of lives.
Though the awareness grew among people after devastating fire incident in Chawkbazar, old part of Dhaka, triggered by a parked car’s CNG cylinder explosion, the check of expired CNG cylinder did not increase, sources said.
In CNG Rules-2005, it is clearly stated that CNG cylinders installed in vehicles must undergo testing every five years. The cylinders must be replaced if their integrity is found to be compromised.
Sources related with the re-testing procedure said, only 20 percent of the vehicles running on CNG are regularly tested. That means an 80 percent staggering vehicles are running for years without undergoing scheduled safety checks.
Navana CNG’s Senior Sales Executive Kamruzzaman said, there are around 100000 CNG cylinders in operation, but re-testing procure has been done of about 32,000 of them.
“Not all of them are from our company, around 20,000 cylinders only are from Navana, which means around 80 percent of vehicles are using cylinders without scheduled maintenance. These unchecked cylinders are just bombs waiting to explode,” He said. Kamruzzaman warned that a CNG cylinder explosion will most certainly kill the driver, passengers, and anyone near the vehicle.
“Since the fire disaster in Chawkbazar, around 30 vehicles came to us for retesting. Usually not more than 8-10 vehicles undergo checks here, on average, per day,” he said.
Meanwhile, Intraco CNG Conversion Centre Assistant General Manager (AGM) Nasir Uddin said, “It costs around Tk 3,500 to re-test a CNG cylinder installed in a vehicle. So, some people avoid scheduled maintenance checks to save money.”
“Re-testing takes around 2-3 hours if there is no serial of customers and if the cylinder is empty. Many car owners think of it as a hassle,” he said.
Sources from the Rupantarita Prakritik Gas Company Limited (RPCL) confirmed that a total of 6,836 CNG cylinders have been retested since June last year. RPCL also trained 1,138 people to re-test vehicles.
Data collected in June last year shows a total of 503,131 vehicles run on CNG across the country, and 269,506 vehicles among those are conversions. A total of 93,242 auto- rickshaws and 40,383 vehicles were also imported as CNG-driven automobiles.
General Secretary of Bangladesh CNG Filling Station and Conversion Workers Owners Association, Farhan Noor said: “CNG cylinders used in vehicles have internal pressure of 3,000 PSI (pound-force per square inch), compared to around one 1 PSI in LPG cylinders used in homes.
