Holiday Traffic Snarled as Storage Tanks Full of Jet Fuel Burn at Denver Airport : Aviation: Facility remains open, but United Airlines is forced to curtail flights. Pall of smoke drifts into the city. Highways in the vicinity are jammed.

Four storage tanks holding more than 2 million gallons of jet fuel caught fire Sunday near Stapleton International Airport, snarling comings and goings at the terminal as holiday travelers headed home after Thanksgiving.

A fire at a holding pond that had collected some of the spilled fuel was extinguished with foam, but authorities feared it might reignite and spread to another nearby 2-million-gallon fuel tank.

Firefighters had been trying to cool two 800,000-gallon tanks containing jet fuel throughout the day, spraying them with strong jets of water, but they caught fire about 10 p.m.

An attempt to snuff that part of the fire with foam failed.

Three firefighters were treated at Denver General Hospital for dehydration and heat exhaustion and two others were treated for smoke inhalation at the scene, but the fire caused no serious injuries.

Smoke from the blaze cast a pall over metropolitan Denver and caused visibility problems on nearby Interstate 70, which remained open.

Norm Avery, a Stapleton spokesman, said the airport was open, but United Airlines was forced to delay, cancel and divert flights because of a fuel shortage.

United Airlines reported flight delays of up to four hours out of Denver, affecting connecting flights at other major hubs, officials said.

There also were traffic jams outside the airport on one of the its busiest days, when travelers were returning from the Thanksgiving holiday. Stapleton is the nation’s fourth-busiest U.S. airport as measured by numbers of passengers traveling through it.

The fire was reported about 9:30 a.m. at the fuel tank farm about a half-mile north of the Stapleton terminal and just south of I-70.

Also threatened were two tanks about 100 yards from the blaze that held 1.5 million gallons of jet fuel each, said Mike McNeill, a Denver Fire Department spokesman.

The fire torched nearby utility poles and generated so much heat that firefighters worked in 30-minute shifts near the flames.