‘It Rained Oil’: Remembering the Explosive 1958 Hancock Refinery Fire in Signal Hill
May 22, 2:00 p.m.
I'm 9 years old, waiting on a Thursday afternoon for the school day to end. I've lived my whole— short —life in Lakewood, a new suburb incorporated in 1954. There are square miles of the same kind of neighborhood in every direction.
I rode my bike to school and will ride it back. After school, I'll watch black-and-white "Popeye" cartoons with their bewildering 1930s cultural references. People say I live in suburbia, where the routines of family life are everything and nothing ever happens.
The history of oil complicates those clichés. Oil from fields in a wide band from Newport Beach though Long Beach to the Baldwin Hills powered the industrialization of Los Angeles and transformed the city in the 1920s. Even in 1958, the region's oil fields are among the most productive on the West Coast. Refineries in Signal Hill, Carson and Wilmington continue to distill crude oil into volatile fractions, the most important of which is gasoline.
I feel the impact. The stench of hydrogen sulfide and other byproducts of oil distillation are regularly in the suburban air. Refineries flare off combustible gasses from tall stacks in bursts of flame that can be seen for miles at night. With modest effort, I could ride my bike from my house to the cracking towers and storage tanks of the Hancock Refining Company on the brow of Signal Hill five miles away.
The refinery has storage facilities for 290,000 barrels of crude oil and 753,000 barrels of refined products. If it weren't for the smog this May afternoon, I could almost see the Hancock plant from my school yard.
2:05 p.m.
A "white mist" rises from an 80,000-gallon tank of partially refined oil at the southwest corner of the Hancock refinery. Workers a few yards away see it and wonder what it means. Those nearer see the tank bulge, its seams split and the contents empty out in a black tide. Wayne Bradshaw, a refinery worker near the collapsing tank, remembers later that "there was a big whoosh and the whole works was going up." A river of oil from the ruptured tank is burning.
Workers begin shutting distribution valves to other tanks. Some workers close gates on the dike that surrounds this corner of the tank field, hoping to contain the burning oil. But the river of fire escapes and widens as it flows, following the contours of the hillside toward the refinery's parking lot and a natural gas storage facility. At the foot of the hill is a Navy airbase and the Long Beach airport.
In those first minutes, one refinery worker is trapped by burning oil and dies. Another, running to his car in the parking lot, is overtaken and consumed. Amazingly, they'll be the only fatalities.
The moving fire births more fire as more tanks fail and refinery equipment and parked cars ignite. There's a succession of violent explosions — an eyewitness remembers 15 to 20. One blast is so powerful that it rockets the cap of a storage tank into the air "like a flying saucer" until it lands hundreds of feet away. There's no safe distance from this fire.
Fire department units arrive at 2:15 p.m. Class isn't over until 3:00 p.m. at my Catholic elementary school. The fire is running hot on Signal Hill, but from where I'm sitting, the subject isn't disaster, it's English grammar.
2:15 p.m. to dusk
The fire is uncontrollable. The Signal Hill Fire Department and units from the Long Beach and Los Angeles County fire departments struggle just to hose down tanks that are likely to fail as the fire consumes thousands of gallons of oil and petroleum products spilling from damaged tanks.
Signal Hill Fire Chief Lloyd Colson tells reporters, "We've been expecting this to happen for years. We're not trying to put the flames out. We can't. Chances are [the refinery] will burn all night."
We've been expecting this to happen for years. We're not trying to put the flames out. We can't. Chances are [the refinery] will burn all night.Lloyd Colson, Signal Hill Fire Chief, 1958
The fire reaches four gigantic natural gas cylinders next to a tall gas holder. Their detonation would drive a wall of flame over the Long Beach Naval Air Station and into the city's airport. Nearby is another menace: a tank, mostly underground, filled with tetraethyl fluid, a lead-based gasoline additive. If the temperature of the tank goes above 200 degrees, the contents will boil out as a toxic cloud that will drift over east Long Beach and into Orange County.
As the stink of burning crude oil fills the corridors of Long Beach General Hospital, its 400 tubercular and respiratory patients are evacuated.
Wives of refinery workers gather at the plant entrance, waiting for news of the men who are said to have been trapped in the fire, perhaps already dead. No one knows. Nearly 2,000 gawkers watch the fire from vantage points on the hill, their cars clogging the streets.
By late afternoon, at least a dozen storage tanks are burning within the folds of the black smoke that continually wells up from the refinery (as shown in this newsreel). The fire is even changing the weather. The Long Beach/Lakewood temperature rises from 73 degrees before the fire to 77 degrees.
At 4:00 p.m., another explosion, greater than those before, rattles windows in an arc from San Pedro to Seal Beach. It feels, some eyewitnesses will say later, like a huge sonic boom. I hear it and go outside to watch a purple-black cloud rise from Signal Hill and spread, a man-made storm front. The cloud is a mile wide and 6,000 feet in altitude. I think it looks like an atomic bomb detonation, like the whole hill will turn into a pillar of fire.
Oil in the cloud rains on Long Beach. I see flakes of burnt metal fall lazily into my front yard in Lakewood. Soot coats houses and cars in Garden Grove in Orange County, 15 miles away. Falling soot will reach Santa Barbara before nightfall.
On our television set, tuned to KCOP/Channel 13, the Hancock fire is nothing but contrast: blazing gouts of flame against a black pit of smoke. The newscasters who covered the Kathy Fiscus death in 1949 have learned how to extract the maximum drama from just a few facts. What I watch are the firefighters who seem to walk into flames and darkness.
The slurry of water and oil flowing through the refinery threatens to carry the fire into the Naval Air Station, 1,400 feet away. Bulldozers scrape the slope below the refinery into a line of protective berms. Oil is already in storm drains emptying into the Los Cerritos flood control channel. Workmen try to stop its flow into Alamitos Bay with truckloads of dirt.
Night, May 22 to May 23
Nightfall makes the fire even more terrible — a hell of smoke and flames, easily seen from my front yard when the veil of black smoke shifts. Navy, Air Force and Forest Service fire crews relieve city and county firefighters. Another explosion rattles north Long Beach and Lakewood at 9:00 p.m. I don't remember hearing these.
Intact oil tanks and the vulnerable natural gas facility are continually hosed down, but water pressure in the Signal Hill distribution system is falling, either from the volume of water being poured into the refinery or from the breakdown of a key pump. Water diverted from the Long Beach system prevents hose lines from going slack.
Firefighters and refinery crews have one victory. Near midnight, County Fire Chief Keith Klinger confirms that the fire has been contained to the Hancock refinery. But he warns that a sudden change in wind direction could breach the containment.
Dawn, May 23
Daylight and the fire burns as fiercely as yesterday, but efforts to drain tanks around the fire should deny it new fuel. The tank of tetraethyl fluid, continually hosed down to prevent its toxic contents from escaping, has held through the night. Despite repeated flare-ups nearby, the four natural gas cylinders and the large gas holder at the edge of the refinery have not failed. (Badly damaged, these cylinders will be declared a total loss.)
The Los Angeles Times covers the fire this morning with page after page of photographs. I'm an avid reader and now a little worried. What if shifting winds drop oil or soot over my house? Reporters are puzzled by one discovery. Air Force police are guarding a part of the refinery not touched by fire. The reporters speculate on the military secrets the refinery conceals.
Foam units, used to fight aircraft fires, arrive on loan from the Air Force. Fire crews have a two-part strategy: water sprays to cool the area near a burning tank and foam to smother the flames when firefighters get the equipment in place.
With water and foam, more than 100 firefighters continue through a second night to control pockets where oil is still burning, but the fire is dying, starved of fuel as the basin of oil around the ruined tanks burn down.
Fire Chief Colson is optimistic. He tells reporters that they'll have the fire out by morning.
May 24 and afterwards
Morning and the fire isn't out, but it's been defeated. At noon, the fire is fully under control. By late afternoon, the most stubborn remnants of the fire are beaten down. From my Lakewood street, the plume of smoke looks like a band of darker haze in the smoggy sky. Then the fire is finally out, and the aftermath begins.
Hancock will supply its service stations in Southern California with gasoline from cooperating refiners. Insurance adjusters in Long Beach meet to plan how to respond 15,000 homeowner insurance claims. Losses to Hancock are estimated to be nearly $9 million, making it one of those most costly refinery fires in Los Angeles County history. Hancock stock actually goes up.
The bravery of the firefighters who walked into the refinery's inferno is acknowledged by the press and Hancock company officials. Funeral services will be held for the two men killed as the fire raced down the slope of Signal Hill. Patients return to Long Beach General Hospital. Hancock pledges to repaint the houses where oil from the fire's plume stained walls and siding. A year after the fire, Hancock merges with Signal Oil & Gas.
There are theories about the cause of the Hancock refinery fire, although a definitive cause wasn't found. Something in a loading area may have exploded. The first tank to fail was heated to help its contents flow. Perhaps something had failed in the heating system, or some valve that should have been open was closed.
Hancock wasn't the first refinery fire on the hill. The Fisher fire destroyed tanks and derricks in 1924, before Signal Hill had its own fire department. The fire had the potential to destroy the entire oil field. The Richfield fire in 1933 killed ten workers and injured another 35 and destroyed a two-block area of homes. Dozens of other fires and explosions ripped through Signal Hill refineries from 1921 to 1996.
Refineries are gone from Signal Hill today, but oil well pump jacks still nod like giant rocking horses in many parts of Los Angeles County. Some oil wells on Signal Hill are surrounded by homes in new subdivisions.
Refineries remain in Carson and Wilmington, as do the risks they represent to air quality and environmental health and from another catastrophic fire. I can still tell by the stench in the afternoon air when a valve in a refinery's tangle of pipes and towers has failed.
The Hancock fire is almost forgotten today. What oil made of Los Angeles County remains. Its effects are in the soil and in the air and in the lives of those of us who live and work in the long shadow of Signal Hill.
[Author's Note: This account of the Hancock refinery fire is taken from newspaper stories published as the fire burned. As first-hand stories, they don't always agree on the sequence of events. Sometimes they don't agree on basic facts. I've tried to assemble the most likely version of what began in the early afternoon of May 22, 1958.]
Sources
News reports that give a vivid, day-by-day account of the fire are behind a paywall at Newspapers.com. (Current subscribers to Los Angeles newspapers may have free access.) Brief accounts of the Hancock fire are online at Signal Hill History and at the Signal Tribune website. Former LA County Fire Captain David Boucher, in his memoir Ride the Devil Wind, recalls his service at the fire scene.
