A fire at an oil tank battery owned by Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has killed one worker and injured three others in Colorado, authorities and the company confirmed.
Contracted workers were doing maintenance work at an oil tank facility near Mead when an oil tank battery ignited, The Woodlands-based Anadarko said. Local authorities found the oil tank battery “fully engulfed in flame,” the Weld County Sheriff’s Office said.
Two of the three injured workers were transported to a nearby medical center for burn treatment. Authorities haven’t disclosed the identity of the worker who was killed.
Late last week, the oil company said the oil tank site has been secured and the company and local authorities are investigating the cause of the fire.
“Work crews were finishing projects associated with a facility upgrade,” the company said. “The facility was not in operation at the time of the incident.”
The oil tank battery was only a few miles away from a house that was destroyed in a fatal blast that Colorado investigators linked to an abandoned gas line connected to a well owned by Anadarko. That explosion in mid-April killed two men and seriously injured one woman.
In response, Anadarko said it has shut in 3,000 vertical wells in the region and will permanently disconnect the 1-inch lines running underground from those wells in northeastern Colorado. Natural gas flows from the low-pressure lines to power oil field equipment that separates oil from gas and water.
Anadarko’s stock price has fallen from around $60 a share to $51.62 a share since it disclosed it was cooperating with a Colorado probe of the home explosion on April 26.
This story originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle, an Energy Voice content partner. For more click here.
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