Stoughton
While the storm which passed through the Stoughton area on Monday afternoon brought a bit of welcome rain to the region, a lightning strike at an oil battery not far from the community also created some unwelcome excitement.
Pat Slatter, fire chief of the Stoughton Fire Department, said, “The call came in at 1:30 p.m. that lightning had struck the Pemoco Ltd. Battery (roughly 16 km north and 6 km east of Stoughton) and we attended the scene. There was more than one tank at that site but only one tank was burning.
“There was no-one injured or in any danger. The battery is located in a pasture, and there’s no houses or other structures nearby. And there’s both a dirt berm and a fire-guard all around the perimeter of the battery. So, there wasn’t really any danger of the fire spreading to anything.
“There was a lot of smoke, and because it was petroleum burning, it was black smoke. But the smoke from the wildfires that we experienced recently was actually worse than this fire, which essentially created a narrow strip of smoke that drifted west.”
Because the fire was contained to the battery, Slatter says that standard policy is to let itself burn out.
“Most oil companies have a ‘let it burn’ policy in situations like this, because they don’t want us risking injury trying to put it out. And from an environmental stand-point, you can end up creating a bigger mess if you try to put a fire like this out.
“In the end, what we do is our decision. But since there was no danger to people or property from this fire, allowing it to burn itself out seemed the best course of action. We blocked off the road in order to keep anyone from going too close to the site and getting hurt. There was an operator on-site who shut off the wells leading to that battery. And the fire diminished significantly when the last well was shut off.
“So, we left the scene at 3 p.m. leaving people from Pemoco in control of the situation, because at that point the fire was contained, and everything was being looked after.”
The Stoughton Fire Department was called back to the scene on Tuesday morning by Pemoco, to spread foam and thereby extinguish any fire that had been still burning.
