The morning of June 28, 2014 was filled with smoke and fear for Monroe County residents as Statoil’s Eisenbarth Well erupted in flames around 9:00 am. The fire began with a ruptured hydraulic hose with which fluid caught fire. Not long after, “the fire had spread to other pumps on the location and was spreading rapidly over the well pad” [7]. The amount of water needed to extinguish the fire was not readily available and there was only one road for tanker trucks to bring water to the site leading to the volunteer fire departments to only be able to contain the fire rather than extinguish it. Thankfully, nobody in the responding crew was injured, but equipment was lost. A video capturing the immense flames of the fire can be found below.
The New Martinsville fire chief issued a statement about the difficulty of controlling the blaze as he said “…the abundance of chemicals and explosives on the site, made attempts to halt the fire challenging, if not nearly impossible…Numerous plans to attack the fire were thwarted each time by the fires and numerous explosions…” [7]. In the case of this fire and the constant explosions and increasing fire from the surrounding chemicals, there was no option other than to let the fire burn out as it was too difficult to contain and eventually extinguish. This reveals the danger of daily operation of fracking wells and how hard accidents are to control. Accidents happen, and engineers can try their best, but they will never be able to account for every single mistake that can lead to a catastrophe such as this. Large amounts of chemicals under extreme pressure are very unpredictable and must be always kept safe. There is no telling when the next time something like this will happen. Improvements to these wells are always being made to prevent accidents but harvesting large amounts of energy from the Earth will always come with great risks. The burned out well pad can be seen below.
Figure 6: Eisenbarth Well fire aftermath [7]
The only surviving equipment from the site was a large white trailer containing thousands of pounds of dangerous chemicals. This trailer full of SP Beaker (1,100 lbs), soda ash (200 lbs), compressed gas cylinders of oxygen (3 – 2,000 lbs), acetylene (2 – 2,000 lbs), propane (6 – 20 lbs), and miscellaneous aerosol cans [7]. This trailer was given special protection during the fire as it would have easily combusted and released many chemicals into the air.
25,000 gallons of various products were lost in the fire either to combustion or leaking into the environment. The list of chemicals on the well pad “included but was not limited to: diesel fuel, hydraulic oil, motor oil, hydrochloric acid, cesium-137 sources, hydrotreated light petroleum distillates, terpenes, terpenoids, isopropanol, ethylene glycol, paraffinic solvents, sodium persulfate, tributyl tetradecyl phosphonium chloride and proprietary components” [7]. Rubber from the tires of many trucks also burnt in the fire making the smoke a serious inhalation hazard. The 300,000 gallons of water used to contain the fire collected chemicals that did not burn and began to seep into the ground. The flow of the toxic water was not restricted to the site as two paths of toxic flow spread from the fire. Both streams of toxic flow met and continued flowing towards Opossum Creek and eventually the Ohio River.
Figure 7: Paths of chemical-filled water to Ohio River [7]
There is a lot to learn from this event as so much went wrong. While discovering and eliminating each potential fire risk seems like a daunting task, steps towards safety and containment can be taken in case of another fracking catastrophe. The Eisenbarth Well did not include any berm for containment of chemical spills allowing for the toxic water mentioned before to travel as far as the Ohio River. Also, the site was very congested with equipment leaving operators little room to maneuver the fire to get extinguishers before the fire got out of hand as it did. Spreading out the equipment allows for a more difficult spread of the fire and for trained employees to better handle the fire.
In the end, no employees or firefighters were injured, and the fire eventually burned out the next day. Statoil was issued a $223,000 fine by the state of Ohio for violations of state law in the establishment of safety precautions around the site [8]. Cleanup of this disaster was very difficult due to the widespread flow of toxic water.