Eight firefighters were killed battling a massive refinery blaze on this week in Philly history
The explosions at the Gulf Oil Refinery in Southwest Philadelphia led to one of the deadliest days in the Philadelphia Fire Department's history.
The match was struck without a hiss.
In the early hours of a summer Sunday morning, vapors snuck out of an overfilled oil storage tank and snaked through the hulking Gulf Oil Refinery smeared along the Schuylkill in Southwest Philly.
What happened next was so destructive, and so deadly, it was assigned a chilling and haunting label: “Refinery Holocaust.”
Nightmare fuel
Around 6 a.m. on Aug. 17, 1975, the vapors found an ignition source in a nearby boiler house.
The overfilled storage tank, which at the time was being filled from a Venezuelan tanker, contained more than 70,000 barrels when the fire started.
The explosion at the sprawling refinery Gulf called Girard Point drew a massive response from local fire departments.
Teams coated the oil-slicked flames with firefighting foam, and the six-alarm blaze was declared under control just before 9 a.m.
Eight hours later, a second explosion rocked the refinery, spreading to more storage tanks and sending racing flames through waist-deep pools of water mixed with oil and chemicals and engulfing a group of firefighters standing in those pools.
The second explosion elevated the inferno to 11 alarms.
Ruin and ashes
Under thick clouds of charcoal-gray smoke a day later, three Gulf employees steered a rowboat over the toxic pools to shut off a valve that was spewing liquid naphtha. The highly flammable chemical used in the refining process was fueling the last fire, and the last dangerous threat.
On Aug. 26, nine days after the escaped vapor silently swept through the refinery and ignited a blaze that wreaked $10 million (or more than $60 million today) in damage, the last of the flames were finally and fully extinguished.
The Daily News noted that the occasion was celebrated by those in attendance with cigars and watermelon.
Investigators ultimately concluded that inattentive employees had let the tanks overfill, and the buildup of flammable vapors ultimately led to the explosions. The city cited and fined the corporation for code violations.
Many large storage tanks, the refinery’s office building, and an assortment of pipelines and processing units were wiped out.
Six firefighters died at the scene, two others succumbed later to severe burns, and more than 30 were injured — two critically — in what is considered one of the deadliest days in the department’s history.
“The tanks, the line — maybe you can replace them,” Bill Zahner, then a Gulf fire safety man, told the Daily News in 1975, “but the bodies you just can’t replace.”
