Lightning sparks oil tank firenear Tulsa: No injuries reported;

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Jun 13, 2006 by Matt Cauthron

A lightning strike ignited a storage tank at a petroleum storage farm south of Tulsa on Monday morning, a company official said.

Lightning struck the tank and sparked the fire just after 9 a.m., said Russ Florence, a spokesman for Tulsa-based Explorer Pipeline Co. Florence said emergency crews arrived on site shortly after the blaze was reported.

John Godfrey, pipeline integrity officer for Explorer, said no injuries were sustained as a result of the fire, and that firefighters contained the blaze by midafternoon. He said the fire was limited to one tank, and that other tanks weren't near enough to cause concern that the fire would spread.

Godfrey said homes near the storage farm were evacuated.

We called for the evacuation of five homes near the area purely as a precaution, Godfrey said. Our primary concern is public safety and the safety of the firefighters.

Godfrey said Explorer crews had been draining the contents of the tank since early Monday morning to make fighting the fire easier and safer. He said they had extracted around 93,000 barrels of the 125,000-barrel tank by midafternoon. He predicted that little of the product drained from the tank would be recoverable.

Repairs to the tank will be substantial, Godfrey said. We haven't been able to assess the damages yet. Our first concern is to make sure everyone is safe - then we'll start thinking about repairs and damages.

Godfrey said that some of the oil extracted from the burning tank was diverted into an alternate pipeline that begins in Glenpool and runs just outside of Chicago.

The fire started on the rim of a floater, a fuel storage tank with a floating top, Florence said. As the fire intensified, traffic along Highway 75, which runs near the storage farm in Glenpool, slowed to a crawl as passersby watched black smoke roil from the site. The smoke could be seen for miles.

The fire was in the same area as an April 2003 tank fire that burned for more than a day before being contained. Hundreds of homes were evacuated during that fire and Glenpool schools closed for two days.

The National Transportation Safety Board blamed tank-farm operator ConocoPhillips for that fire, which caused $2.3 million in property damage.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.