Fire Destroys Seven Oil Tanks at Unocal Facility in Fullerton

A stubborn fire that destroyed all seven 84,000-gallon tanks in a Union Oil Co. of California oil field in Fullerton burned throughout the night Tuesday, spewing plumes of thick, black smoke hundreds of feet into the air.

Firefighters, using thousands of gallons of fire-retardant foam, had managed to contain the fire to two tanks for most of the evening. But the blaze flared up again shortly before 8 p.m. and spread to the remaining tanks when the burning fuel from the first two tanks seeped through the foam, said Fullerton city spokeswoman Sylvia Palmer Mudrick.

Authorities called in an Orange County strike team that specializes in controlling brush fires to stand guard as winds sent hot embers into the brush-covered hillsides nearby, Mudrick said.

At least two Unocal employees were working near the site of the fire, which began about 12:30 p.m., but no injuries were reported, fire officials and Unocal representatives said.

The cause of the blaze was not known.

No homes were threatened, although firefighters had to wait 90 minutes for arrival of foam fire retardant. They were further hampered because of a limited water supply that forced them to lay about 4,000 feet of hose from the nearest hydrants, fire officials said.

“What really complicated the situation out here today was that we had no water (hydrants) in the area, so we had an extremely difficult situation,” Mudrick said.

The Unocal oil tank field is located at Bastanchury Road, west of State College Boulevard.

Fullerton Fire Chief Ronald Coleman said that airport emergency crash units from John Wayne Airport and El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, which carry foam fire retardant, were requested to combat the oil blaze.

“Most of our fire trucks carry a small amount of foam to fight fires such as these. But the reason we had to call in the foam was because our regular units couldn’t spray enough foam in the immediate fire area,” he said.

“There was so much collapsed metal from the tanks and connecting pipe systems that, well, it was like fighting a fire inside a metal jungle gym. There was metal everywhere,” Coleman said.

The oil field is a processing center where crude oil is warmed by injecting steam at high pressure and then the oil is sent by pipeline to a Wilmington refinery, said Barry Lane, a company spokesman.