Monday, February 18, 2008

BOOM!


I expect gasoline prices to jump at least 10-15 cents per gallon based on this.


Blast rocks Texas oil refinery


(CNN) -- An explosion rocked a Texas oil refinery Monday morning, shaking homes three miles away, witnesses told CNN.


Video from I-Reporters showed a massive cloud of smoke forming over the refinery in Big Spring, Texas, about midway between Dallas and El Paso.

One worker was injured in the blast, and all workers had been accounted for, Blake Lewis, a spokesman for refinery owner Alon USA, told The Associated Press. He said the fire was under control.

I-Reporter Larry Bates said he was lying in bed when the walls of his house shook and he heard a large boom.
"And I thought immediately, 'Oh, my God, the refinery,' " Bates said. Watch huge cloud of smoke over refinery »

I-Reporter Diane Murphy said the blast rocked her home a couple of miles away.

"I was just in the kitchen, and it shook the whole house, and it popped the doors open," she said.
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"I thought it would knock the walls down," John Moseley, managing editor of the local newspaper, the Big Spring Herald, told the AP.

"It was extremely scary. You shook, you were so scared," Laura McEwen, who lives about two miles from the refinery, told the AP. "Our walls shook. It jolted your bed. It was like an earthquake."

The refinery employs about 170 people and can process about 70,000 barrels of crude oil a day, according to the Alon USA Web site.

It supplies an area including West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, southern Oklahoma and Arkansas with fuel products and asphalt, the Web site says.

CNN affiliate KOSA-TV reported that Interstate 20, which passes the refinery, had been shut down.

Residents living within a mile of the facility were asked to evacuate, according to KOSA.