The report entitled Enemalta Confirms Damage To steam Turbine (October 18) is clear proof of the shambles that Enemalta’s public relations are in.

The criticism by Joe Mizzi, MP, may not have been 100 per cent accurate but he scored many telling points.

The pictures of the damaged turbine blades and of the footprints in the bicarbonate dust were a real scoop. The turbine damage was too obvious for any evasion; Enemalta had to come clean on that.

The rest of the Enemalta statement is a mess. “Enemalta explained (sic) it was not the intention of the tests to operate the plant continuously at full load”. But operation of all eight engines for 24 hours a day for the 240 days (eight months) of the test period was just what Enemalta proposed in the IPPC permit application.

KPMG, supplied with that fake brief, took care to flesh out the vampire bat threatening to suck up even more of the public’s money by concluding that use of gasoil during the test period would lead to a 10 per cent increase in present tariffs. That changed the KPMG ‘serve’ from an intended ‘ace’ into an actual ‘double fault’. The Mepa board failed to question these lacunae in the IPPC permit application.

The bicarbonate is used to remove SO2 from the exhaust, so its presence on the machine room floor pointed to an escape of SO2. If so, that would not have been a pleasant experience for any people present.

Mepa is again passing the buck. Chairman Austin Walker said that it is the responsibility of the three-person monitoring committee, set up under the IPPC permit conditions, to investigate the incident. This is the same body that had nothing to say about the two orange cloud emission episodes, probably produced by excessive use of urea in the NOx removal equipment, and has not published a single result from its six months of monitoring of DPSE emissions at Marsaxlokk and Birżebbuġa.

It could be that the public is going to get a re-run of both the Mercaptan and “precipitator switch-off” charades.