Cyprus: Reflections on the Polyviou Report

Financial Mirror readers may recall that four previous Risk Watch articles have discussed the major hazard risk issues arising from the Mari-Vassilikos disaster of the 11th July 2011. Now that Polis Polyviou has delivered his report to the President and the government, we are finally in a position not only to evaluate and judge the quality of his investigation but also to consider the longer term and wider implications of his findings and recommendations.

An Apology
I had grave doubts that Mr Polyviou was the right person to head this official inquiry, primarily because as a banking and finance lawyer he seemed to lack the scientific knowledge and experience that might be needed for this particular task. I doubted that he would know the right sort of questions to ask in order to get to the truth about the interacting major hazard risks between the Mari site and the Vassilikos site.
The Polyviou Report has completely vindicated him and shown that all my doubts and concerns were unfounded. My apologies to him and also my applause for a very thorough and searching investigation, given the time and resource constraints he was under.
Unfortunately, the Report is only in Greek. In the developed world, it is normal practice for major disaster reports commissioned by a government to be made public at least in English so that, hopefully, the whole world can avoid similar disasters. I have had to obtain my own unofficial translation, on which the following comments are based.

The Domino Effect
One of the reasons my previous Risk Watch articles banged on so much about the compliance status of the EAC Vassilikos power plant vis-à-vis the EU Seveso II Directive was the need to understand that the risks of an individual major hazard site are greatly affected by other major hazard sites nearby. Not only can an incident at one site trigger an incident at the next one (the so called ‘domino effect’) but also, and more importantly, the scale of a domino disaster is likely to be much larger than simply the sum of the two. Thankfully, this did not happen in the Mari-Vassilikos case (just a matter of luck) but the whole thrust of disaster prevention by the two sites, individually and co-jointly, should have been based on the potential geometric risk.
I have experience of an oil refinery in the Middle East that was cheek-by-jowl with a petrochemical plant and indeed provided the latter with some of its feedstock. The refinery and the petrochemical plant were even owned and controlled by the same government ministry. However, they had absolutely no communication between the two sites in terms of major hazards risk management, emergency plans and so on. A Seveso event there would have been orders of magnitude greater than the Mari-Vassilikos disaster. Whereas the refinery was starting to address major hazards risk control at its own process engineering and management systems level, there was a blind spot when it came to engaging with their counterparts next door and a reluctance to ‘rock the boat’ with ministry officials in the capital hundreds of kilometres away
The Polyviou Report examines at length what the EAC did in relation to compliance with the EU Major Hazards Directive, especially chapter 7 of the Report and pages 540-583 in chapter 9. The Report is especially scathing about the EAC’s claim not to know anything about the location of the explosives containers at Mari and their proximity to the Vassilikos site: “I cannot accept the…assertions. We are talking about a huge volume of containers, placed one above the other. Not only was the cargo within view of the power station but any reasonable person could note the distance between the nearest container and the EAC power station. Did the responsible officers of EAC know nothing? Could they not have raised questions about the containers’ contents?… I can only express my amazement and wonder… there was gross negligence”.
The Report found that the EAC site was subject to the EU Major Hazards Directive and that it was incumbent on EAC to comply, especially Article 8 (preventing ‘domino’ effects) from any nearby major hazards. The EAC’s ‘Safety Report’ in 2007 for the Vassilikos site as required under Article 9 did indeed identify the Mari naval base as a potential source of domino effect hazards, including projectiles “and other exogenous factors”. However, this was not amplified or developed and the arrival in 2009 of the explosives containers at Mari did not provoke (as it should have done) a formal review and revision of the Vassilikos site Safety Report, including risk re-assessment and new control measures. The Polyviou Report found that the Labour Inspection Department (one of the two joint regulators) compounded the problem by wrongly telling EAC in February 2010 that the pre-2009 Safety Report still stood.
The Polyviou Report notes that there was confusion and a blinkered approach by various parties regarding the bi-directionality of domino effects. Mari was seen as being potentially vulnerable to major hazard threats from Vassilikos but not vice-versa. Further, the Vassilikos external emergency plan was only to be triggered in the event of an actual major accident and not if precursor factors were identified e.g. the buckling of the explosives containers in Mari in the days prior to the explosion. In Mr Polyviou’s words, the explosion and the domino effects were an “accident waiting to happen”.

Corruption of the Spirit
Chapter 11 of the Report addresses what Mr Polyviou sees as the root cause of why the explosives were left so long in the open at Mari, and why the underlying principles of the EU Seveso Directive (i.e.(a) prevention, (b) limit effects), were misunderstood and ignored by EAC. His analysis and comments on the deep malaise within Cypriot society verge on a polemic. In paraphrase, he alleges that a relentless pursuit of vested self-interests by politicians and officials coupled with their incompetence, empty rhetoric and a “reduced perception of duty and selective observance of morality and legality” has resulted in a deeply cynical and mistrustful populace. No one wants to take personal responsibility so decision avoidance, laisser faire and buck passing become the norm.
“The responsibility for the disappointing state of affairs…..is now understood by all as timeless and accumulated. The tragedy at the Mari naval base reflects not only a colossal failure in this case but the failure of the political system in general. In this case, nothing worked. ….Many public servants and the military showed sloppiness, avoiding responsibility and demonstrating self-evident cowardice against political leaders. There was complete collapse of the system (which of course is staffed and led by people, political officials and civil servants). It was very naïve to believe that the recent tragedy is a single or an unexpected event”.

Conclusions and Recommendations
The Report demands serious reforms and not “wishful thinking and empty findings”. Cronyism and clientism must go and be replaced by a fully transparent and merit-based system. Among the 13 recommendations in chapter 11 is the establishment of an Independent Commission Against Corruption to, among other functions, encourage public spirited ‘whistleblowers’ to report wrongdoing. For further discussion on an ICAC, see Risk Watch ‘Corruption of the Spirit’, Financial Mirror, December 2007.