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State investigates cause of US refinery blaze
Published:
Monday, February 20, 2012
BP Cherry Point Refinery fire, north of Ferndale, WA. Fire crews doused a dramatic blaze that broke out Friday at Washington's largest oil refinery, sending up towering flames and creating a thick plume of black smoke visible for miles. No injuries were reported. AP Photo
SEATTLE—State safety inspectors are investigating the cause of a dramatic blaze at Washington’s largest oil refinery Friday near Blaine, as BP launched its own review into why it happened. The fire broke out in the sole crude processing unit at the BP Cherry Point refinery in northwest Washington, sending plumes of black smoke visible for miles. The fire was extinguished about an hour later, BP spokesman Scott Dean said. One person suffered a minor injury.
It was too early to know what caused the blaze, Dean said Saturday. Other units at the facility are on standby until the company completes an assessment and restart plan, which means the facility is currently not processing crude oil, he added. “It’s too soon to speculate on a restart (date) or duration of the outage,” Dean said. Another BP spokesman, William Kidd, said overall production could be halved in the next several days, but the effect on future production won’t be fully known until they know the extent of damage. The refinery still has finished product in tanks to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, he said, adding: “It’s not like our tanks went dry.”
The one-square-mile (2.5-square-kilometre) refinery employs more than 800 people and can process as much as 230,000 barrels of crude oil a day, mostly transportation fuels, from Alaska. “Our top priority yesterday was getting the fire under control quickly and making sure no one got hurt,” Dean said. The next steps will be getting a crew safely into the location where the fire occurred, he said.
A BP report overnight to the National Response Center suggested a flange fire had started between the north vacuum heater and the north vacuum tower of the crude unit, but “that is not at all confirmed,” Kidd told the Bellingham Herald.
Meanwhile, BP crews were working to secure the site where the fire occurred, so it may be a couple days before inspectors can do an initial walk-through, Department of Labor and Industries spokesman Hector Castro said. In 2010, the refinery was fined more than US$69,000 for 13 serious safety violations, but those were not in the crude processing unit where the fire occurred, Castro said. He added that all five of the state’s refineries have been fined for safety regulations. (AP)
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