Ferndale Refinery Blast Leaves Seven Injured

At least seven people were injured in an explosion and fire at the British Petroleum oil refinery near Ferndale, Whatcom County, about 4:15 p.m. yesterday.

The incident is believed to have taken place during normal maintenance, and ``no outside influences were involved,'' said Jerry Eklund, BP human-resources manager.

Emergency equipment from the Whatcom County Fire District 7 and from the Ferndale and Bellingham fire departments responded. The fire was brought under control in about a half-hour, Eklund said.

The injured workers were taken first to a Bellingham hospital, but at least two were reported to have been airlifted to the Harborview Medical Center burn unit in Seattle.

The most seriously injured worker was identified as Jeff Heidringfelder, 34, who was in critical condition at Harborview with burns over 70 percent of his body, a nurse supervisor said.

A plant worker who was on the scene, but who asked not to be identified, said most of the crew members worked for a company called PM Northwest, a contracting company that does startups and shutdowns of oil refineries.

A spokeswoman for PM Northwest in Mount Vernon said four of the company's employees were injured in the explosion. One of them was being treated at Harborview and three others were in Bellingham. The company has been in business more than 30 years, she said.

The plant worker said the fire started when a 36-inch line that

fuels a furnance was accidentally opened, sending fuel into the open fire. Flames went about 300 feet up a smokestack in the ensuing uncontrolled blaze, he said. Much of the plant had been closed down since Thanksgiving power outages, and the processing unit that exploded was the last unit to be brought back into production, said the worker.

The worker said one of the injured men was burned almost beyond recognition, with his hands burned off.

Eklund said the explosion and fire occurred in a processing unit used to convert crude oil into various blends of gasoline. The unit was being restored to service after being taken out of use recently because of power outages.

The unit is in an open building about 100 feet square, he said.

``It's a large complex of pipes and towers and smokestacks,'' said Eklund. ``What we do is fairly volatile. We assume a flange gave or a gasket blew.''

He said workers in the unit could have been standing a few feet to a few inches from the explosion, and normally would have been wearing hard hats, goggles and fire-retardant coveralls.

Eklund indicated some of the injuries were minor. ``Some of them had singed eyebrows and rosy complexions,'' he said.

The identities of most of the injured workers had not been released, pending notification of next of kin.

Three of the workers were BP employees and the remaining four were members of an outside contracting firm hired to work at the plant.

Jerry Shelton, a resident who lives about five miles south of the refinery on Puget Sound, said the impact of the explosion could be felt some distance away from the plant.

``I felt a huge blast . . . that shook the windows and rattled the patio windows out on our deck,'' Shelton said. ``We went outside to see what had happened and we could see a large black plume of smoke rising from the refinery about 1,000 to 1,500 feet in the air.

The Kuwaiti government-in-exile owns 9.9 percent of British Petroleum, but speculation about terrorism was dismissed.

``There is no outside influence that would have caused this. We have had no threats of pending violence,'' Eklund said.

Eklund said the oil refinery has a tight security system of perimeter fencing, lighting, close circuit TV and guards making regular rounds.

The BP refinery, on the Strait of Georgia, is one of four large refineries that supplies most of Western Washington's gasoline and other petroleum products. The others are the Arco refinery at Cherry Point and the Shell and Texaco refineries at Anacortes.

The BP refinery was built in 1954, and has the capacity to refine 79,000 barrels - about 3.3 million gallons - of oil per day. The refinery was built by Mobil Oil, and sold to Cleveland-based Sohio, a subsidiary of British Petroleum, in 1988 for $152.5 million.

Most of the crude oil it refines comes from Alaska's North Slope by tanker. When the refinery was built, it received most of its overland from Canada by pipeline.

The equipment where the explosion and fire occurred is not critical to workings of the plant, and it will continue to operate, Eklund said.