Incident Report

Subject:                     Oil Facility Fire Burns for Almost 24 Hours

Date of Email report:   Tue 06/09/201

Report Detail:

The chief of a southeast Saskatchewan First Nation is concerned about the health of some residents after a fire at a nearby oil storage facility started pumping black smoke into the air Monday night. The fire started at around 7 p.m. Monday and kept burning until around 3 p.m. Tuesday at the Star Valley facility, owned by Calgary-based NAL Energy, located north of Kisbey on grid road 605. On Tuesday morning, 15 to 20 people from the Pheasant Rump First Nation were temporarily evacuated from their homes that were in the direct path of the smoke. "Some of our people are feeling the effects," Chief Olive McArthur said Tuesday morning before the fire was extinguished. "Two of the residents' houses were just covered in smoke . just enveloped in it. It's disastrous."

The effects were worsened, McArthur said, because the First Nation was not informed about the fire until Tuesday morning. A media release issued by NAL said the fire's cause had not yet been determined, but several people in the area said it was sparked by a lightning strike. Responding to the concerns of Pheasant Rump, Clayton Paradis, the director of investor relations for NAL, said air-quality monitoring was taking place the entire time the fire was going so the firm will have information about that in the coming days. As well, Paradis said, an investigation into the entire matter - from the cause to the handling of the situation - is to be conducted.

That investigation is not expected to begin until late this afternoon at the very earliest as no personnel is being allowed onto the site for 24 hours after the fire was extinguished as some hot liquids remain on the site. But Paradis said the retardant foam used to extinguish the blaze will also eliminate fumes or smoke from being emitted from the burned tanks. Because two tanks were burning at the facility and several others had not caught fire, the NAL-contracted industrial firefighters did not attempt to extinguish the fire right away. "Those are the more dangerous situations where you've got fire and tanks that aren't ignited yet," Paradis said. "It just makes it too dangerous to get in so (they were) standing at a distance and waiting for the fire to either fully spread or (we had) emergency fire crews ready to implement extinction."  There's no estimate on the amount of damage yet, but NAL expects to cut production by 300 barrels per day in response to the decreased storage capacity. Paradis said that is rather insignificant considering NAL produces 29,000 barrels per day. No jobs will be affected as Star Valley is an unmanned facility.  It won't be known when the facility could be operational again, but Paradis said the best-case scenario likely means weeks of shutdown or a worst-case of two months.

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