j29 July 2013, This is a month old, but posted 01Sept. Well, other than being in the front row seat of a tank exploding, the events here have been pretty mundane. Haven’t had much that I’ve done except make flyer’s for the Cajon cook-shack up the street and reading. Back the exploding tank. To start with nobody was hurt due to this event. On the 29th I was getting ready to off-load some salt water (we call it Produced Water) when I was asked to hold off until after a thunder storm had passed. So I’m sitting about 70 yards from the Salt Water Disposal and I’d just got done talking to the disposal maintenance guy (Shawn) again about a half hour later, and we decided we’d wait about another 5 to 10 minutes before we started ‘pumping’ again. Not two minutes later a bolt of lightning hit one of the salt water tanks and it went BOOM!! That picture was taken about 40 seconds after the strike. And since there are venting/overflow tubes between of the SW tanks, the other two tanks went up about 3 seconds apart; boom, …boom …boom. Cool!!! Shawn had just pulled his pick-up back in front of me to wait for us to start, as you can see, there’s no pickup in front of me. He got the hell out of there quickly. The white thing on the right is the visor over windshield, I’d stuck my phone out the window (it was raining pretty hard at the time too) and took this first shot. Everything you see there except that little building on the right (where the well head is) was completely consumed by the fire. I burned for 3 days because those tanks on the left are oil tanks. There’s enough petroleum in ‘salt water’ to still make it pretty volatile as you can see. The facility separated out as much of the crude from the water as possible and stored it in the left hand tanks. Thankfully one of the tanks had just been emptied so only two of them had any amount of crude in them. Since there were several trucks lined up behind me to use the disposal and they had to get out of my way before I could back up, I used the time to take several photos. This is the first one on the left and the second one was taken 9 minutes later further down the access road. As you can see, everything is engulfed. So, one was hurt and I got some really neat photos last week. That was about it the my excitement for last couple of weeks.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 02:07:45 +0000
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