Blaze at state-run HPCL’s 15 MTPA Visakh refinery follows fires at Pachpadra, Mathura and Vadodara; the same east-coast plant has a record of deadly accidents stretching back to 1997.
LAHORE: A fire broke out late on Monday at Hindustan Petroleum Corporation’s (HPCL) refinery in Visakhapatnam, India’s oldest east-coast refinery, the latest in a series of blazes at Indian state-run refineries that has raised questions about safety at plants that have been rapidly expanded.
The fire started at around 10pm on Nov. 2 at a pitch intermediate storage tank and was confined to the tank area, HPCL said. The company reported no casualties and said all refinery units were operating safely. India’s oil ministry has not commented on a cause.
Officials have given differing versions. HPCL said the fire was at the pitch tank, which holds the thick residue left after fuels are distilled from crude. Malkapuram Circle Inspector E. Narasimha Rao said it began in the sulphur unit, ETV Bharat reported, while The Hindu placed it at the pitch tower of the refinery’s newly integrated residue upgradation unit.
Revenue Divisional Officer Dileep Chakravarthy said a small blast preceded the fire, though police did not confirm an explosion. Residents reported loud sounds and saw flames and thick smoke over nearby neighbourhoods, and some moved away in fear.
The circle inspector said HPCL’s own tenders put out the fire without outside help, while the RDO said Andhra Pradesh Fire Department equipment was also used. Firefighters brought it under control within about an hour, and the RDO said an inquiry into industrial safety would be opened.
If The Hindu‘s account is correct, the fire hit one of the plant’s newest facilities. Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised the commissioning of the refinery’s residue upgradation facility in January, part of an expansion that has taken the Visakh refinery to 15 million tonnes a year.
The plant was built by Caltex in 1957 with a capacity of 0.675 million tonnes, nationalised in 1976 and merged into HPCL in 1978. It supplies fuel across India’s east and south.
A record of deadly accidents at Visakh
Monday’s fire is the latest of several at the same site, according to a list compiled by ETV Bharat:
September 1997: Explosions in six LPG tanks set off a fire that took two days to extinguish. ETV Bharat put the death toll at about 70 and linked the disaster to a pipeline gas leak months earlier that had not been properly repaired.
August 2013: A fire at a newly built cooling tower killed 28 people, most of them contract workers. Andhra Pradesh’s director of factories said at the time that “accidents of this nature cannot happen without some kind of violations”, and that the refinery’s executive director, as occupier of the factory, could face prosecution if responsibility was established, Business Standard reported. The outcome of that inquiry was not widely reported.
March 2018: An explosion at a cooling tower under construction killed one worker and injured at least 40.
July 2017: Lightning struck a crude oil tank, causing panic but no casualties. April 2019: A fire in the continuous catalytic reformer unit left three workers with minor injuries. May 2021: A fire broke out in a crude distillation unit; no one was hurt, and a five-member technical committee was formed to investigate.
Fires across India’s refining network
The Visakh incident follows a run of fires at other state-run plants in the past two years.
April 2026, Pachpadra, Rajasthan: A fire broke out near the crude distillation unit of HPCL’s new Rs79,450-crore Rajasthan refinery on April 20, a day before Modi was due to dedicate it to the nation. The ceremony was postponed. HPCL’s preliminary assessment pointed to a hydrocarbon leak through a valve or flange in the heat exchanger circuit, and the oil ministry appointed a four-member team led by former MRPL managing director M. Venkatesh to investigate. No one was hurt.
November 2024, Vadodara, Gujarat: A blast and fire at a storage tank at Indian Oil Corporation’s Koyali refinery killed two people. The next day, a fire at the crude distillation unit of IOC’s Mathura refinery, which had just returned from a month-long maintenance shutdown, injured eight, ThePrint reported.
In most of these cases, no cause has been publicly established and no one has been publicly held responsible. Investigations are usually conducted by the companies themselves, by oil ministry panels or by state factories departments, and their findings are rarely published in full.
The preliminary causes that have been disclosed point to equipment and maintenance failures rather than outside interference that a leaking valve or flange at Pachpadra, a poorly repaired pipeline in 1997, and a cooling tower at Visakh in 2013 that the state factories department suspected involved safety violations. Several fires, including Pachpadra and Mathura, occurred around the commissioning of new units or the restart of plants after maintenance, periods that safety engineers regard as among the riskiest in refinery operations.
Under India’s Factories Act, the occupier of a plant, typically a senior executive, can be prosecuted for safety failures, but prosecutions of senior officials at state-run refineries are rare.
India is one of the world’s largest refiners and exporters of petroleum products, and outages at its plants can affect fuel supplies across the region at a time when markets are already strained by the conflict in the Gulf. Pakistan’s motorists have felt that strain directly, with petrol nearing Rs400 a litre in early October. HPCL said on Tuesday that the Visakh fire caused no damage to process units, suggesting little impact on output.
Refinery fires are not unique to India. Pakistan’s Byco refinery at Hub was out of action for about three years after a crude oil heater caught fire in 2015, a few months after it was inaugurated, and in July 2023 Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered an inquiry after a fire at a refinery near Ali Pur Chatta in Punjab. Russia’s refineries have also burned this year, including a fire at a Moscow refinery after a Ukrainian drone attack in September. In the United States, industry trackers have logged more than a dozen refinery fires, leaks and explosions in the first half of 2026 alone.
What sets the Visakh plant apart is the repeated toll on the same site, and the gap between the inquiries promised after each fire and the answers made public. Whether the RDO’s new safety inquiry breaks that pattern will be watched closely in Visakhapatnam, where residents have lived beside the refinery’s flames for decades.
Leave a Reply