Roane fire chief: ‘It looked like Mount Vesuvius’

By Loyd Cook

A mid-morning Sunday accident at a Powell oil well sent flaming oil into the sky and started a grass fire, as well as coating a Roane Volunteer Fire Department fire truck with the burning substance.

Roane VFD chief Dusty Flanagan said the what her department found when they responded to the site, just off State Highway 31 in Powell, “looked like a volcano.”

“We saw smoke just before 11 in the morning,” Flanagan said, adding that it was the “flare,” the stack that burns off hydrogen sulfide gas. “It was belching out burning oil ... it looked like Mount Vesuvius.”

She said the burning oil left the stack, starting a grass fire within the confines of the O’Ryan wellhead area. An early-arriving firefighter took a Roane fire truck out into the area to fight the grass fire and burning oil fell from the sky onto the truck.

While that fire was put out, the truck itself was coated with the burnt oil. Flanagan said attempts since have been unsuccessful to remove the substance from the $54,000 piece of firefighting equipment.

“We can’t get what’s on there, off,” she said. Flanagan said the department will have to take the fire truck to a body shop to see what can be done there, either have it buffed off or if some kind of re-painting will have to be done.

She said the department will be billing O’Ryan for the cost.

Flanagan said an O’Ryan employee was summoned to the site “and he knew right off what the problem was.”

The Roane fire chief said an automatic pump that was supposed to remove oil from a “separator” when it filled had failed to automatically start. She said the employee told her that the automatic pump hadn’t worked automatically in a while, that O’Ryan had been told, and hadn’t done anything to fix it.

“I was incredulous when he told me the automatic pump didn’t work,” Flanagan said. “If an employee knew it, and knew what the problem was right away, why haven’t they fixed it yet?”

When the pump doesn’t remove the oil from that separator device, Flanagan said the only place the oil has to go is up through the flare stack. That stack burns the hydrogen sulfide gas as a safety precaution since the gas is hazardous to human health.

Firefighters were able to extinguish the fire, and Flanagan said the O’Ryan employee was able to manually start the pump to move the oil off into the proper relief portion of the equipment.

It’s just the latest safety issue for O’Ryan, a company which has had at least two prior documented incidents since 2006.

On Nov. 16, 2007, the same Powell-area well released hydrogen sulfide gas into the air. A Texas Railroad Commission report about the incident, provided at the request of the Corsicana Daily Sun, indicates that well’s safety equipment shut down the flow of gas when equipment “detected (hydrogen sulfide) release and shut well in and called pumper.”

Corsicana Fire Chief Donald McMullan remembered the incident, saying that Corsicana Fire and Rescue ambulances transported multiple residents to Navarro Regional Hospital.

In February, a wrongful death lawsuit was filed in the Navarro County District Clerk’s Office against O’Ryan Oil and Gas. The lawsuit alleges a relief valve that failed to work properly and resulted in a well explosion in 2006 was not the proper type.

That explosion resulted in the death of Joseph Boykin on Nov. 3, 2006 at a well located in Powell.

O’Ryan Oil and Gas is presently asking for a special exception to the Navarro County Lakeshore Ordinance for an oil well with the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas proposed for a SECR 0070 location. That well has a hydrogen sulfide level of 22,000 parts per million, well above the 300 parts per million level that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) deems as “immediately dangerous to health and safety” on information posted on its Web site.

Eric Meyers Jr., Navarro County’s emergency management coordinator, said he received Roane VFD’s report on Sunday’s incident and has forwarded it on to the Texas Railroad Commission.

The railroad commission regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas.

Michael O’Quinn, the district director in the railroad commission’s Kilgore office, said Tuesday that O’Ryan’s request for approval on the SECR 0070 well has been approved.

O’Quinn also said his office has been informed about Sunday’s incident at the Powell well owned by O’Ryan Oil and Gas and a railroad commission representative would be investigating the situation there “some day this week.”

The Daily Sun attempted to contact O’Ryan president Ryan C. Hoerauf on Tuesday, but a person answering the phones at the company’s West Texas offices, after putting the call on hold, came back and said Hoerauf was out of the office all day. A message left for Hoerauf during that telephone call was not returned by press time.