Hub Oil Explosion - The Fire

The Fire

For more than nine hours after the initial explosion, the fire raged out of control, fueled by oil, jet fuel, and propane. Two more major explosions followed shortly after the first.

C S Martin was asleep at a nearby house on Penworth Place at the time of the first explosion. He remembers it vividly. "Since I was three years old, I grew up in Penbrooke and at one point, I lived on Penrith Crescent less than a kilometer from the blast site. The people in the community always talked about the smells coming from Hub Oil. Many people suffered from frequent headaches, and symptoms not unlike those from the community of Lynwood Ridge. The morning of the blast, I was in bed, and was wakened by the sound of Thunder. I looked out my bedroom window, and the sky was blue, but I thought nothing of it. Moments later, my mother banged on the door and told me to wake up, as she thought Hub Oil had exploded; as she always thought it would. We drove to a pedestrian bridge over train tracks close to a mobile home park close to the blast, and from that vantage point about 35 feet above the horizon, we could see the damage and feel the intense heat from the flame. Later, a very large radius including this bridge, and up to 100 feet from my home were evacuated. My family decided to head south to my Aunt & Uncle's house on Riverside Crescent which I later bought from them in 2011. Safely evacuated, all we could do was watch on the news to see if any more tanks had ruptured and wiped out the community. The fire burned out, and we returned home to find fallout for weeks to come. That day faded into nothing more than a memory."

All three could be heard clearly from the opposite side of Calgary. Many residents of communities near the site dismissed the first blast and resulting plume of smoke as a fire training exercise, as the Calgary Fire Department maintains a training facility about 600 yards south of the site. About 300 nearby residents were evacuated for 20 hours, returning to homes covered in globs of oil, fine dust, and shrapnel from exploded refinery vessels. The Calgary Fire Department lost two truck units in the second explosion, and several firefighters sustained minor injuries. A Calgary Police Service car was also destroyed in the third major blast. In total, three major explosions and more than a dozen minor explosions occurred, which hampered efforts to control the fire. Because there were no major structures threatened, and no significant fuel source to spread the fire a decision was made by the Calgary Fire Department to withdraw to a safe distance and allow the fire to burn itself out considerably before another attempt would be made to put the flames out. Also destroyed in the ensuing fire was the Corral Four Drive In, a four screen drive in theatre that was not open at the time of the accident. The remaining parts of the Drive In were removed in 2001.

The two fatalities of the accident were refinery workers Ryan Silver, 24, and Ryan Eckhard, 26. Both men were killed when the small brick building they were in was completely destroyed by the initial explosion.

An investigation determined that a pressure buildup in a second-hand storage tank caused a massive fireball. Court was told during the trial that the tank that exploded had been sold as scrap 28 years earlier.

The vessel, which was more than two metres in diameter and nine metres in length, was fabricated in 1963 and decommissioned in 1971. Hub Oil purchased it in 1985, but the tank sat unused for another six years until Hub switched its fuel recycling operation from a one-step to a two-step recovery system.