Dec 30, 2022 4 min read

The peace and tranquility of Christmas morning was disrupted for Kasey Duran and her family when they heard an explosion at the cryogenic plant near their Smith Township home, followed by a fire that raged at the natural gas processing facility for nearly 11 hours.

Duran said her two children were beginning to open Christmas presents about 7:30 a.m. when they heard a “jet noise” at Energy Transfer’s Revolution cryogenic plant on Point Pleasant Road, followed by a loud bang that rattled the house.

“It blew and shook the whole house,” Duran said. “A big piece (of equipment) over there caught fire.”

Duran called 911 and then she and her husband gathered their children to evacuate from their Autumn Lane home. They spent the next several hours with family in Burgettstown as fire crews responded to the blaze.

“The kids are terrified. The whole family is scared. The peace is gone,” Duran said.

Duran said she contacted the state Department of Environmental Protection about the incident and was told they planned to send inspectors to tour the plant Tuesday.

“They have to go in and see how much damage was done,” Duran said. “It will be turned off for the foreseeable future.”

DEP spokesperson Neil Shader said they are in the initial steps of their investigation, but that there were no air quality problems reported following the incident. He confirmed that there is no timeline for the plant to resume operations.

“An initial malfunction report has been submitted to the (DEP) describing the equipment failure that led to the fire, with a full report on estimated emissions from the incident to follow,” Shader said in an email statement.

The cause of the malfunction at the plant is not immediately known, and Texas-based Energy Transfer officials said Thursday they were still investigating the incident.

“The plant is currently shut down, and we are working on remediating the site,” Energy Transfer spokesperson Alexis Daniel said in an email. “We are grateful to the local first responders for their ongoing support and to the community for their patience during this time.”

Smith Township fire Chief Brandon Kriznik said his department was dispatched to the plant at about 7:40 a.m. Sunday and found a large piece of equipment on fire. They monitored the fire for several hours, but there wasn’t much they could do to extinguish the blaze since the system was still feeding it natural gas.

“All we did was standby there and just make sure nothing happened. We had to let the gas burn itself out,” Kriznik said. “What happens is when you put the fire out, the gas just omits from there and goes (into the atmosphere) from there. It’s safer and better to let it burn it off so the gas burns off.”

Multiple fire departments responded to the scene and were on the property until about 1 p.m., when Kriznik said he sent them home once the situation appeared to be under control. His firefighters split shifts monitoring the fire while others stayed in the warmth of the plant’s control center conference room to get out of the frigid weather. His department remained at the scene until about 6 p.m. when the fire was finally extinguished.

“It was very, very cold, to be honest with you,” he said. “We used a conference room in the control center for the firefighters to sit down and relax, warm up. We were there monitoring and on standby.”

Kriznik said no one was injured and damage was limited to the plant. The facility, which connects to multiple natural gas transmission pipelines, has been closed since the fire, and it was not known when it would resume operations.

“They’re down still,” Kriznik said of plant operations. “They will notify us when they’re up and when they’re down.”

Duran and her family returned to their home around noon and saw the fire continue to burn for several more hours. She hopes the situation will cause new safety protocols by the company and emergency responders since her family was never officially notified of the incident. By the time a “shelter-in-place” order was implemented, her family had already left for Burgettstown.

“We weren’t going to sit and wait for them to make a move,” she said.