A gas pipeline in Oklahoma ruptured near the Texas border Tuesday — creating an intense fire explosion that shot 500 feet into the sky.
Incredible footage shows the orange and hot white fireball climbing roughly half the length of the Eiffel Tower into the night sky along the Oklahoma panhandle.
The flames burst from a Phillips 66 natural gas pipeline around 9:15 p.m. in Elmwood, on the Oklahoma side of the border, the company said in a statement.
While it’s clear the pipeline suffered a rapture, officials said they are still working to uncover the cause.
“There have been no injuries associated with the incident and no health threats to neighboring residences,” Phillips 66 said.
It took several hours for firefighters to extinguish the inferno, which the Booker Fire Department estimated reached 500 feet in height.
The “pipeline blow out” turned the sky into a hazy orange glow that could reportedly be seen for miles, Elmwood Fire said.
“We are 36 miles away from the fire and we can see it,” one person wrote under a Facebook post by the department showing the intense fire.
Another user posted a photo of the fire’s glow from 25 miles away, while another claimed they could see it from 80 miles away in Kansas.
The US Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration is investigating the cause of the incident along with the Oklahoma Commission Corporation, a PHMSA spokesperson said.
The blaze is the second incident in just weeks involving Phillips 66.
Earlier this month, a worker was injured after a fire broke out at the company’s 285,000-barrel-per-day Bayway refinery in New Jersey.
A similar incident happened last year when a fire broke out in a storage tank farm at the company’s 149,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Borger, Texas, sending six people to the hospital with injuries.
With Post wires