Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

NATCHEZ—When Natchez Firefighters received a call at about 7:15 p.m. about a propane tank on fire Tuesday evening, they thought they were responding to a propane tank in someone’s backyard.

“We were unaware it was going to be an entire oil rig on fire until we arrived,” said Natchez Fire Chief Robert Arrington.

Nonetheless, with the “great” help of volunteers from the Adams County Fire Service and Adams County Emergency Management Agency, he said the fire was extinguished safely, and a full-fledged forest fire was avoided.

When firefighters arrived, they found a treater tank on fire in a wooded area off Hutchings Landing Road. A treater tank is an apparatus that uses propane-fueled heat to separate oil, water, and gas during crude oil production.

The fire was on the Independence Lease Overton Field, owned by Sunland Production Co. of Shreveport, Louisiana.

“The fire really wasn’t the bad part,” Arrington said. “Apparently, what happened is those things have a heater, and something went haywire with the heater, and the propane tank was next to it,” he said. “It was a huge propane tank, in excess of 1,000 gallons of propane.

“Putting out the fire was the easy part. Getting that propane tank cooled off as quickly as possible was the concern,” he said. “Thank God the Adams County volunteers were on scene, and we had enough trucks and volunteers to get the job done. My guys worked well with the volunteers and the Adams EMA. And shout out to the Adams Fire volunteers and the EMA guys for the hard work.

“This could have been really, really bad,” had the forest surrounding the oil rig caught fire,” Arrington said. “This actual situation is something we train on at the academy, one of those worst-case scenarios. We have had that training here in Natchez, and thank God we had because we used that training at that fire scene.”