MUNITIONS such as those stacked at Mari naval base should have been stored in optimal temperatures of between 15 to 25 degrees Celsius, a ballistics expert testified yesterday in the ongoing criminal trial.
Instead, the munitions had been left out in the scorching heat, which in the summer months here can reach temperatures of over 40 Celsius – and that’s under the shade.
The containers were not covered and were exposed to the elements for two and a half years. What’s more, temperatures inside the containers must have been far higher than the ambient temperature.
Ioannis Drimousis, a Greek Navy captain and ballistics expert, was among a team dispatched to Cyprus to investigate the immediate causes of the July 11, 2011 blast. The massive explosion left 13 people dead and scored injured.
The report of the Greek team was delivered to Cypriot authorities on July 13 of the same year. Calling the 421 tonnes of munitions a “ticking time bomb,” the report found the explosion was due to self-ignition of the containers, and ruled out the possibility that an outside source of heat (such as a brushfire) caused the blast.
Reading from that report, Drimousis told the court yesterday that explosive munitions should not be stored in containers for a period exceeding 90 days.
Moreover, the top-down stacking of the containers, leaving no corridors in between, meant that no inspections could take place of individual boxes. In addition, this increased the risk of an explosive incident in one container spreading to adjacent ones.
The location chosen to store the munitions was also far from ideal, said Drimousis. A safe distance of at least 7.5km from residential areas or from areas containing vital infrastructure was advised, he said.
In fact the containers were situated just a few hundred meters from the Vassilikos power plant, which was devastated by the shockwave.
Moving on, the witness said Mari naval base should have been immediately evacuated at the first sign of a detonation (several smaller explosions had occurred before the single massive blast).
Drimousis said also that emergency response teams and firefighters must always be briefed on what type of munitions they will be encountering before being deployed to the site. In the case of Mari, they were apparently not briefed.
The expert further said that authorities here did not pay proper attention to an incident taking place just a week before the blast, when one of the containers was found to have swollen and to have shifted by 30cm from its original position due to an explosion of the munitions inside.
“Had immediate [corrective] steps been taken, it is my opinion that the explosion of July 11 would not have happened,” he said.
The trial continues.
