MONAHANS, Texas — After a pipeline explosion sparked a massive fire in Ward County, the Monahans Volunteer Fire Department were one of several departments who rushed into action.
However, when they got there, they had to hold their ground.
“We arrived on scene, very large fire. You can see it from a distance," MVFD Assistant Fire Chief John Bell said. "We staged the safe distance away and started making notifications to all the oil companies that were involved there.”
Unlike a fire that springs up naturally, these fires happened because of the pipeline explosion.
Whenever there is gas involved, firefighters end up playing the waiting game.
“There's no way to put really those out, you just have to let them burn themselves out," Bell said. "The gas companies will shut the valves on either side of the fire and then burn the gas that's in between them out. So once the gas company shuts in their valves on either side of the fire, the excess gas will burn off and then the fire department we can go in there and extinguish any spots around whether it be grass or structures.”
That wait depends on the strength of the blaze.
“There's no set time. It can be hours, it can even be days depending on the size of the line and how far apart the valves are and how much gas is in the pipeline," Bell said.
Once everything is burned out, firefighters can move in to take care of business.
“We spent about six hours waiting for the fire to burn out and then, once we were able to safely approach the gas company said it was safe to approach their equipment, we went in and spent about three and a half four hours extinguishing all the hotspots and the structure that had burned," Bell said.
Once the fire got most of the gas out of its system, firefighters were then able to tackle it like any other blaze and extinguish it before it could spread any further.
“Today it was just some brush and a office building. It was like a portable trailer that was burning, it was probably a 20 by 30 trailer. We extinguished it like a normal house fire,” said Bell.
Meanwhile, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality informed NewsWest 9 that the pipelines have been shutdown and the fire department conducted air monitoring and determined that TCEQ assistance wasn’t necessary.