Auditing the Siting of Petrol Stations in the City of Douala, Cameroon: Do they Fulfil the Necessary Regulatory Requirements?

Abstract

No other form of technological development had negatively skewed from existing regulations as the siting of petrol filing stations.An audit of the degree to which their operators repeatedly violate the rules regulating their location and operations may encourage the legislature to pass laws that can ensure a balance between the economy and the environment.This study helps to fill this gap, by analyzing the degree to which the siting of local filling stations meets standard norms, taking Cameroon's district municipalities of Douala as an example.In order to achieve this goal, the current regulations structuring the filling station locations were carefully reviewed.Subsequently, key compliance factors were identified, operationalized, and an audit checklist was developed.Other data collection tools included a structured questionnaire designed to capture the views of neighboring communities on the possible risks to their health, land, and therefore to the environment presented by the station, and a global positioning system receiver for the collection of spatially explicit data.The nearest neighbourhood Index, (Rn) in ArcGIS10.3.1 environment was used to assess the distribution pattern of the stations.Questionnaire data was analysed using SPSS20.0.It is revealed that the distribution pattern of the 152 stations surveyed is mostly random in Douala I (Rn = 0.8573), Douala III (Rn = 0.9879), Douala IV (Rn = 0.6984), and, dispersed in Douala II (Rn = 1.7837) and Douala V (Rn = 1.5764) district municipalities.While most of them, 94 (61.84%) were within the minimum 500 m radius from one another as specified by laws, 99.34% of them didn't conform with the recommended minimum distance of 7m from the centre of a major road, and the 400m radius from residential areas.The results suggest that the siting of petrol stations in the city neglect the hazards accompanying them.The database created in this study could provide a platform to policy makers for appropriate actions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.