Blaze on Pulau Busing oil storage tank put out after 6 hours

SINGAPORE – A raging blaze involving an oil storage tank on Pulau Busing, an island off the south-western coast of Singapore, was finally extinguished early on Wednesday morning (March 21) after a six-hour firefighting operation.

The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) tweeted at around 1.45am that firefighting operations had ended. There were no reported casualties in the fire, which started at about 5.50pm on Tuesday.

The SCDF said 128 firefighters, 31 support equipment and several members of the Company Emergency Response Team (CERT) worked to fight the blaze, along with officers from the Police Coast Guard, Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, Republic of Singapore Navy, and National Environment Agency (NEA).

A video of the blaze, which SCDF said was taken at the "height of the operations", showed the top of the oil storage tank completely engulfed in flames that shot up several metres into the air.

Throughout the six-hour operation, firefighters took turns to recuperate after "arduous prolonged firefighting operations", before returning into the "thick of (the) action at ground zero", said the SCDF.

The cause of the fire is not yet known and is under investigation, SCDF told TODAY on Wednesday.

Two large foam monitors were used to contain the oil storage tank fire while five unmanned water monitors were cooling the adjacent tanks.

The SCDF said that radiant heat from the affected oil storage tank posed a "major challenge" to the firefighters. Despite the risks, SCDF firefighters and members of the CERT had pressed on, it said.

Mr K. Shanmugam, Minister for Home Affairs and Law, visited the island along with Permanent Secretary (Home Affairs) Pang Kin Keong for a first-hand account of the firefighting operations and to meet up with the SCDF Emergency Responders.

Praising SCDF for doing an "incredible job", Mr Shanmugam said in a Facebook post on Wednesday morning: "The raging fire was fully extinguished, after six hours of battling it. A complex operation. But SCDF planned and executed well... An incredible job by SCDF."

According to Reuters, the oil storage tank is operated by Tankstore. 

It has a total capacity of 2 million cubic metres, or 112 tanks, to store petroleum and petrochemical products, according to the company's website.

The fire-struck storage tank was said to have contained fuel oil, according to a Tankstore employee who declined to be identified as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

TODAY has reached out to Tankstore for further comments.

A by-product of the crude oil refining process, fuel oil is used as a shipping fuel and in power generation.

The fire is not expected to have any material impact on fuel oil trading and supply in Singapore, a global trading hub of the fuel, two Singapore-based fuel oil traders told Reuters.

The land on Pulau Busing is leased by JTC Corp to a petroleum storage company.

CORRECTION: In an earlier version of the story, we reported that Pulau Busing is owned by JTC Corporation and leased to a petroleum storage company. That is incorrect. The land on Pulau Busing is leased by JTC to a petroleum storage company. JTC does not own or manage Pulau Busing. We are sorry for the error.