Fire was the greatest threat to the petroleum industry and it could occur at any point between the well head and the marketplace. The Carbon Oil Company operated its "Big Still" for only a year before it exploded. Another year was spent rebuilding and on the day that the operation was resumed, it exploded again.
Such disasters were common during Petrolia's infancy. One of the most spectacular was the fire which began at the King well on August 3, 1867. Oilman John D. Noble provided the following eyewitness account:
One Saturday night I was paying my men in my office down in the town, I had been very busy all day, it was 11 o'clock at night, and I was just closing the office, when I heard the whistles on the boilers of all the wells up in the woods blowing an alarm of fire A number of men got spades and dug a great trench all around the tank, the flames got hotter and hotter, and the staves began to burn through and the oil to leak out and fill up the trench. [The tanks were made of wood and raised on stilts.] Presently the boiling, fiery oil overflowed the tank and set fire to the oil in the trench. Quicker than I can tell it the flames leaped higher, and the trench overflowed, and the ground caught fire. I was standing at my well and saw the burning, fiery mass flowing over the ground toward me; my rig caught fire, and my oil flowed over the ground and added fuel to the flames, which now had assumed alarming proportions. I moved away and sat down on a log by the road side and watched my tanks catch fire one after the other, and the burning oil ran down into my three underground tanks, setting fire to them also. I looked up and saw that my last tank was gone, and the burning, fiery oil flowed over the land; well after well caught fire; the flowing well was aflame with all its tanks, and the oil hissed and burned and the flames covered a space of ground about a quarter of a mile [0.5 kilometres] wide by a quarter of a mile [0.5 kilometres] long, and leaped 100 feet [30 metres] high, and great columns of black smoke rolled up to the sky. I sat on the log all night and watched the burning furnace, and wrung my hands.
Every day I used to go up to the same spot and watch the fire burn, for it was impossible to put out a fire like that, it had to burn itself out, and it took two weeks burning night and day to burn out. The ground was saturated with oil to a depth of two feet [0.6 metres], and when the fire was out it looked like a great brickyard, and no one could get near his well for sometime, the ground was so hot.
This photograph shows one of the many fires which plagued the oil industry in Petrolia. In this case, an agitator was destroyed by flames. It was in the agitator that chemicals were added to the distilled oil.
