The Inspectorate for Environmental Protection ordered suspending the activities of Danube Oil Company as from January 24, until the identified violations are dealt with. Also, the Agency for Technical Supervision ordered to demolish the noncompliant silos. The collected inspection material will be transmitted to the Prosecutor General’s Office for examination. The authorities’ reaction comes after two grain silos at the Giurgiulești International Free Port caught fire the past two weeks, IPN reports.

The Inspectorate for Environmental Protection determined that the business entity worked in the absence of the ecological assessment of the facility, of an environmental permit for pollution prevention and without the admissible emission standards being set.

The Agency for Technical Supervision issued a prescription to take away the silos and set a period of 60 workdays for dealing with the violations. According to specialists, the project solution adopted for storing the sunflower groats wasn’t appropriate according to the technical documentation as the conical base silos were planned for storing non-sticky and nonaggressive substances. The noncompliant use affected the resentence, stability and fire safety of the silos.

The Inspectorate for Environmental Protection is to gauge the extent of the damage caused by the fire and to transmit the inspection material to the Prosecutor General’s Office for consideration.

The Government said that Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilița on Monday instructed to examine all the silos existing in the country so as to avoid such incidents in the future.

The first fire at the Port occurred on September 15 last year. Then, two metal silos with sunflower groats with the volume of 1,200 m3 each collapsed. On November 13, the temperature inside two of the four silos rose to 100℃ and one of these started to burn on December 30, while the groats were being taken out of the storage tower. A similar fire occurred on January 16. As a result of the smoldering of over 1,000 tonnes of sunflower groats, the container collapsed. Another silo with sunflower groats caught fire on January 20.