There was a huge flash fire on location one day, I was standing dangerously close when it happened. It was day shift in the middle of winter, and night shift left us with a small mess which compounded into a total shitstorm.
While a fracking company is doing their job, the oil well is open and flowing, and whatever's coming out of it was our job to manage. So, we transfer fluids to tanks and send natural gasses to burn off in a flare 60 feet above the ground. This is a 24/7 operation, and we just arrived at location to replace our night shift.
It was a particularly cold day, must have been somewhere between -10 and -20 Fahrenheit. Night shift fucked us, they froze off one of our lines that we needed to transfer fluids from the well to the tanks. If fluid can't flow through this line, the pressure of the well will go somewhere we don't want it to go, and something will explode.
We halted the operation to fix the frozen line, then another line froze off, one that was critical to us in particular to prevent our equipment from exploding. For some reason, the supervisors on location decided to keep the well flowing and we'll just do our best to fix this second frozen line very quickly.
Somebody brought over a heater to help thaw our frozen lines. This heater was powered by a diesel engine, if you've ever been warned about leaving your car running at a gas pump, you'll know that engines can ignite gasses and cause a fire. The heaters we use on oil locations have a safety shut-off switch, if it detects gas, it shuts off.
So, our line is frozen off, our tank is nearly full and about to reach its max pressure capacity, and we've got a heater with a diesel engine coming in to save the day. We also had what we call an open-top tank, it's about 5 feet tall, it has no lid, and we occasionally divert flow into it to clean solids out of the bottom of our tank or, in an emergency, reduce pressure in our tank. We were using this quite frequently as our tank's pressure was reaching capacity, because lines just kept freezing off and everything was fucked up.
Some idiots never enabled the gas detecting safety shut-off switch on the diesel-powered heater and doubled down by positioning it down-wind and very closely to our open-top tank, which we were frequently dumping gasses and oils into.
So, there I was, doing some maintenance on our equipment, standing maybe 7.5 feet away from this open top tank. I hear a loud BANG go off behind me, I turn around to see what it was, and I quite literally couldn't see anything but fire. No sky, no ground, no tanks, just fire. That's how close I was.
This put me into shock. My memory blanked out until I was about 15 feet away from the fire, sprinting, and my supervisor somehow fell on his ass. I sprinted by him, we locked eyes, then suddenly some very important company people were on location, and I was in their shack detailing what happened.
This fire was at least 20 feet tall. Not only was our open-top tank ignited, but also two of the 20' tall upright ranks next to it. If I happened to be downwind from the open-top in that moment, which me, and others, frequently were throughout the day, I'd have been toast.
The funniest part about this is we had a new guy on location that day. He told me he's quitting and never looking back; it was his first and last day in the oil field.
Well, I got a few paid days off and had a fun story to tell my friends at the bar, and an enhanced appreciation for proper safety measures.
