Oil battery near Stoughton catches fire after lightning strike

Large, billowing clouds of black smoke were seen coming from an oil battery that caught fire Monday afternoon near Stoughton.

The Stoughton Fire Department was called to the scene at 1:30 p.m. after lightning struck the oil battery tank.

The fire may have looked intimidating, but the chief of the Stoughton Fire Department was not worried.

“It looks way worse than it is,” Pat Slater said Tuesday. “It’s pretty sensationalized when you see this massive cloud of smoke, but it’s a pretty narrow plume and it’s quite high in the atmosphere so it really doesn’t bother too many people.”

Slater described it as a “nothing-left-to-save situation.” Oil companies have a no-entry rule and a “let it burn” policy when fires happen.

According to Slater, trying to put out the fire would have been more danger than it was worth, and would have jeopardized the safety of firefighters.

The only concern that Slater had was if there were propane tanks near the battery, but an operator confirmed there were not.

Proper safety procedures made this an easy fire to extinguish. The operators shut down the wells so nothing gets into the battery. With nothing fueling the flame, it died off from there.

“Once they do that, the fire dissipates itself quite quickly,” said Slater.

The fire department left the scene at 4 p.m. on Monday; Slater said the fire had already burned down to almost nothing. On Tuesday, they came back to put out the additional hot spots.