Smoke scare temporarily shuts down Shell gas station

Workers at the Shell Gas Station at Vlissengen Road were forced to temporarily shut down operations yesterday after smoke was seen coming from the air conditioning vents on the ceiling of the Sol Shop.

When Stabroek News arrived on the scene around 4:30pm, the Manager of the Service Station, Robin Low, said that he is uncertain of what happened but speculated that it had been an electrical problem.

Shell Service Station workers climbing to the roof to get a closer view of what caused the smoke.

“There was some smoke in the Sol shop, so we took some precaution and shut down everything, the staff did what they were trained to do and everything was shut down… the fire engine came, checked out everything and saw it was fine and we are waiting on the electrical engineer to check out the place,” Low told reporters.

He noted that the fire tender arrived about three minutes after the report was made and he considered the response as excellent. Low added that the service station has six fire extinguishers outside and three inside.

The ultra-modern Shell service station was officially commissioned December last year and was said to have cost almost $500M.