When a big fire broke out at the Tema Dry Dock about two weeks ago, the refinery's fire brigade earned the respect of its peers when it teamed up with other fire fighting institutions to bring the fire under control after several hours of intense flames, heat and smoke had engulfed the whole area.

It was a day of tragedy and heroism as many vital industrial plants were threatened directly by the fire. Many lives were lost.

By the time the fire was brought under control, the refinery had lost its seawater pumping plant, powerhouse and several sections of its pipeline installations.

With Nana Owusu Nsiah's commission of inquiry already taking evidence, the blame game would no doubt point fingers in many directions, but no matter where the fingers of blame eventually land, the role the staff of TOR played in mitigating what could have been a major international tragedy and subsequent remedial actions taken to ensure regular flow of petroleum products has to be recognized.

With the penchant for bad and scurrilous stories that are now the main fare of Ghanaian politics and media (including websites controlled from abroad) people would be forgiven if they concluded that patriotism, heroism, dedication to work and in fact, positive values are dead in Ghana.

But there are many unsung heroes daily toiling to hold up the country, without making any noise in the media or on political platforms! If the safety people at TOR had not been professional enough and shut down the Crude Distillation Unit (CDU) and taken remedial actions to flush out their pipelines, the fire could have, in all probability spread to the refinery compound.

But not much can be discussed in this story regarding what actually took place that day in order not to prejudice the commission of inquiry's work. The consequential effects of the Dry Dock fire have affected TOR in two crucial areas.

The first is that seawater, which is used for process cooling at the distillation unit cannot be pumped from the port to the refinery. The unit has been shut down since the fire.

The refinery is currently working with only the Residue Fuel Catalytic Converter (RFCC), which is cooled with freshwater but is not capable of supplying the country's full requirements of refined products, which means that the CDU, which is the main refining unit, has to come on stream without delay.

The second area affected is that crude oil and imported finished products cannot be pumped from the port to the refinery due to the damaged pipelines.

In other words, unless the refinery can come up with the strategies of sorting these problems out in the very immediate short term, supply would be seriously affected and Ghanaians would see long fuel queues.

But TOR has risen to the occasion. Under the direction of a Crisis Management Team (CMT) set up immediately after the fire, the CDU has been converted to use freshwater and should be up and running anytime soon.

The engineers and technicians have designed and fabricated piping connections to tap water from the RFCC cooling system to the CDU to enable it to operate.

By last weekend, they were at the final stages of the conversion. Without this innovation, it would have taken close to two years and millions of US dollars to get the unit back on stream. Now it's taken just a couple of weeks of hard work and ingenuity.

Similarly, repair works on the pipelines at the Dry Dock are in the final stages of completion and anytime soon, vessels will start discharging crude and finished products to the refinery to augment the stocks already being held in the tanks of the refinery.

The ingenuity and speed with which the dedicated staff of TOR has handled this near total national tragedy, means that Ghana's economy will not slow or halt as a result of the accident.

In terms of supply, it would seem like nothing even happened…