The chicken farm

It was reported in The Times that during the Enemalta estimates debate, Minister Austin Gatt compared the gas depot to a chicken farm.

May I state that this chicken farm was erected in 1958 with a storage capacity of 100 metric tons and designed to cater for 12 metric tons a day. In the mid-1970s, on the elimination of town's gas, the storage capacity was raised to 2,800 metric tons. Daily sales shot up to around 60 metric tons, reaching well over 100 in peak season. The plant, installed in 1986, is still capable of filling and testing well over 500 cylinders an hour. This chicken farm is not doing that badly after all.

To state that the workers work four hours a day may give the impression that the depot is opened only for that number of hours. On the contrary, the depot is busy for eight solid hours, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Since the system is semi-mass production, the cylinders are unloaded onto the conveyor chain, filled, tested and either reloaded onto a delivery truck or piled in the stock area necessitating constant handling, so the workmen relieve each other. One cannot be a lame chicken to handle about 100,000 kilogrammes in weight (cylinders plus gas) a day.

Trucks are barred from entering the plant well before closing time. Before the end of the day, physical stocks of full and empty cylinders have to be taken, reconciliation of sales carried out and loads of other administrative work, which cannot be carried out at the same time of the un/loading of trucks, has to be done. In any case, by noon or at the most 1 p.m., most of the delivery trucks are already parked in their bay and most of the distributors have called it a day - they prefer to work at the crack of dawn instead of in the afternoons (this can be witnessed by anyone passing by the gas depot at that time).

Why can people not buy cylinders themselves rather than having it delivered? Apart from all the driving around with full and empty gas cylinders, have the aged, the sick and the handicapped been taken into consideration?