The fire broke out Tuesday evening at the Chevron refinery in El Segundo, a town located about 20 miles southwest of Los Angeles, before being extinguished after multiple fire crews in the area responded. No injuries have been reported as details on what caused the fire are still emerging.
The Twitter account for the city of El Segundo said in a tweet around 8:30 p.m. local time that the “isolated fire” inside the Chevron facility located in the city had been put out.
“There was no offsite impact or public threat,” the tweet said.
The city’s fire department said in a statement issued earlier that crews responded to the blaze inside the refinery at approximately 6:15 p.m. local time. The fire department from the nearby city of Manhattan Beach and the Chevron Fire Department also responded, according to the El Segundo Fire Department.
The Los Angeles County Fire and El Segundo Fire departments had earlier dispatched crews to the refinery to put out the immense flames, reported KTLA. The inferno seemed to be concentrated in one area of the refinery, and it is currently unclear what sparked the blaze and what it was in that segment of the facility that caught fire, the station reported.
Chevron told Newsweek in an earlier email that there have been no injuries and the company’s internal fire department responded to “an isolated fire inside the Chevron El Segundo Refinery.”
“Chevron’s immediate priority is to safely extinguish the fire and ensure the continuing safety of its employees and the community,” the company said in the statement, which did not include information on the cause of the fire and what equipment was affected.
The smoke and flames generated by the fire were visible for miles and its cause is being investigated, reports ABC affiliate KABC-TV. Chevron spokesperson Jeff Wilson told the station that information wasn’t available on the type of equipment that caught fire.
Chevron’s El Segundo oil refinery is the largest facility of its kind on the West Coast and processes more than 276,000 barrels of crude per day, supplying more than 20 percent of all motor vehicle transportation fuels consumed in Southern California, according to the company’s website. The refinery was built in 1911, and Chevron describes it as having “zero safety incidents” and “zero environmental incidents.”
Newsweek reached out to the Los Angeles County Fire Department for comment.
Update 11/09/22, 12:00 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information and a statement from the El Segundo Fire Department.
