Fire at Unocal Refinery Spews Smoke Seen for Miles; No Injuries

A spectacular fire at the Unocal Corp. refinery in Wilmington on Sunday evening spewed billowing smoke high enough into the air to be seen miles away, fire officials said.

Five Unocal employees were on duty when the blaze broke out at 6:03 p.m. in a cracking unit at the 400-acre refinery at 1660 W. Anaheim St. No injuries were reported.

The fire was brought under control after more than 100 firefighters battled it for nearly two hours, Assistant Los Angeles City Fire Chief Ed Allen said.

The firefighting effort was “textbook,” Allen said. “We isolated it, cooled it and waited for everything to extinguish.”

The cracking tower, one of three at the refinery, heats heavy crude oil under pressure, making it lighter and easier to refine into gasoline, jet fuel and other petroleum products.

The burning oil was isolated by shutting off valves feeding crude oil into the unit, said Unocal spokesman Barry Lane.

Damage was confined to the burning cracking unit, said Kenneth Smith, Unocal’s chief refinery engineer. There were no estimates of damage or of the amount of oil burned, Smith said.

“The quantity is unknown at this time,” Smith said, “but it doesn’t take a lot of oil to create a lot of smoke.”

The burned cracking unit will be shut down for an unspecified time, company officials said, temporarily reducing by more than half the refinery’s capacity of processing 110,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Officials added that the shutdown will not affect the amount of gasoline available to Unocal dealers.

Unocal officials said they did not know what caused the blaze, which is under investigation.

“There were no reports of any explosion before the fire broke out,” Smith said.

A team of investigators from Cal/OSHA arrived Sunday night to examine the fire that they are calling an industrial accident.