From the Web ~
One summer weekend in 1955, Whiting, Indiana, joined an elite group of American cities -- Texas City, Pasadena and Amarillo in Texas, Baton Rouge in Louisiana, Romeoville in Illinois and Avon and Torrence in California -- as the scene of one of the worst American refinery disaster of the 20th century.On the Saturday morning of Aug. 27, 1955, the overnight shift at Standard Oil’s Whiting, IN, refinery neared quitting time with one big chore left to accomplish — restart a 252-foot-tall hydroformer reputed to be the largest in the world. Beyond that , the weekend held the promise of breakfast, bed and warm weather.
Then, at 6:12 a.m., without warning, several explosions tore apart Fluid Hydroformer Unit 700. Debris weighing many tons rained down across a quarter-mile radius of the blast. Moments later, flames began to spread that would consume the refinery’s tank farm acre by acre for the next two days. In the end, the fires took eight days to extinguish with 67 storage tanks destroyed.
Most tragic, deadly metal projectiles flung by the blast reached a residential neighborhood adjoining the refinery, damaging homes and killing a 3-year-old child as he slept. By coincidence, the refinery’s current fire chief, Ken Harman, was the same age when the disaster happened.
Today, just as in 1955, the Whiting refinery remains the largest inland refinery in the United States, covering more than 1,600 acres. Standard Oil became Amoco in the late 1950s, which merged with BP in 2000. To most people, the biggest event of 1955 is that Elvis shot his first movie. Harman, however, refuses to let the memory of that terrible weekend 45 years ago fade into the past. The refinery fire inspectors keep a photograph on the wall of the dispatch office showing one of several storage tank boilovers during the fire. |
