The Galveston County Daily News

Terry Hutson, of Teppco Pipeline, gave members of the Community Advisory Committee a primer on storage tanks at their most recent meeting.

But the comment most people heard was that Texas City is a better-than-average place to get struck by lightning.

“Galveston County has one of highest occurrences of Cloud to Ground lightning in the U.S.,” according to Hutson’s PowerPoint presentation.

“Tanks normally are not affected because of extensive grounding systems. Just like all lightning strikes, occasionally the odds are there to get a hit, he said.

One of their tanks, containing crude oil, was struck on July 23 about 6 p.m., and it promptly caught on fire.

But help was already in place, Hutson said.

The goal of fire suppression systems is to keep the tank from becoming “fully engulfed.”

“The system worked very effectively to stop spread of fire and extinguish burning materials,” he added.

Industrial mutual aid fire departments, along with local fire departments, brought the whole thing under control in a little more than an hour.

Times have changed for tanks and tank fires.

Some big new tanks, not yet in wide use, are grounded to dissipate electrical charges. Local tanks are made of steel, which is not especially susceptible to lightning, he said. Almost all of them have floating roofs, which means the tank fits right on top of the product and seals off any oxygen. And they all have other seals.

Because we have so many tanks, with so many different products stored in them, we were all happy to hear fire suppression is better than it used to be.

Back in my reporter days, I used to have regular brushes with activities of the fire department, most of them pretty dangerous. A photographer and I followed the fire truck through the gate of a certain refinery to get to a pretty good fire one day. They ran us off and stayed mad at us for a long, long time. (I still am hoping everybody who was there back then is gone now.)

On another occasion, probably the most dangerous, we went down to the docks, where a barge was leaking gasoline into the Texas City Channel. They made us disconnect the flash equipment from our cameras, and all the vacuum trucks started their engines and disconnected their batteries before coming down to the scene of the leak.

I called in a story from a guard shack nearby, along with a reporter from the rival Galveston paper, then waited while the trucks with foam arrived.

They started foaming the water and soon it was a very pretty sight, with foam floating all across the channel. The wind would pick up wisps of it and waft it through the air.

It wasn’t until I got all the way back to my Texas City Daily Sun desk on Fourth Avenue that I realized I had been very, very close to real danger. Then, I sort of collapsed quietly into my chair.

But that wasn’t a tank fire. I attended one of those long ago, somewhere back behind what is now Valero.

It was a gasoline tank and also was struck by lightning. I don’t think it had a floating top. It burned for days and days, and we reporters would keep driving out to see what was happening.

I remember telling Ken Jones Sr., then the fire chief, that it was “the most boring fire I had ever seen.”

A drama queen. That’s me.

Cathy Gillentine is a columnist for The Daily News. She may be reached at cgillentine1(at)sbcglobal.net.