Fifty years ago, an explosion at the Triangle Refinery in Doraville shook the entire community. It resulted in mass evacuations, a three-day-long fire and several casualties.
Todd Drummond was five years old on the morning of April 6, 1972, when it occurred. “It was a huge explosion. It felt like it had moved the house off the foundation,” Drummond said. He continued, “My father said, ‘Go with your mom.’ And I said, ‘I want to stay with you.’ And then he yelled at me to follow my mom, and my mom was gone. She was down the road in her nightgown, and she was trucking it out of there with my brother.”
The cause was an overfilled gas storage tank at the Doraville Triangle Refinery. Gas from the tank spilled over to a dike below, which led to a nearby neighborhood. The vapors from the gas were said to have been sparked by a home’s pilot light, causing the house to explode and set the storage tank ablaze.
A Refinery employee and a resident from Doral Circle were killed instantly. Firefighters and emergency personnel rushed to the scene, trying to put out the roaring flames before they reached the next storage tank.
Three hundred residents were evacuated from their homes.
DeKalb County Fire Lieutenant J. D. Boozer was on the scene that day. “It was chaos from the word go. The radiated heat waves were so tremendous that you could only stay there about 15-20 minutes, and they would rotate you out and send a fresh crew over.”
Flames reached up to 400 feet, and the smoke was said to even be visible from Alabama. Firefighters from around metro Atlanta and beyond were trying to put out the intense fire, but soon the second and third storage tanks caught fire.
After three days of pumping water and hitting the blaze with submersible foam, they tried an alternative. “We just kept more water on the unburned tanks, trying to keep them cool so that they wouldn’t catch fire and let the rest of it burn out. Tank one, two and three…just allowed it to burn up the product,” said Lt. Boozer.
The fire was put out, and the rest of the tanks were saved from damage. But the Doraville citizens had other issues to worry about when they returned to their homes.
Pam Bowles was a resident of Doraville and eight years old when the explosion happened. “I do remember when we came back home, our house just smelled like smoke. The whole house smelled like that, inside and also outside, everywhere in the neighborhood. And I don’t even know how long that lasted, but for me to remember it…I think that went on for quite some time.”
In the weeks and months that followed, the Doraville citizens gathered at City Hall to see what could be done about the property damage. And they wanted to ensure that this would not happen again.
Many of the residents were blue-collar workers and couldn’t afford to move away. Some, like the Bowles family, decided to settle and stay in Doraville. “My sister and I were going through some of my mom’s old papers, and I came across a letter from, I suppose, it was an attorney who represented the refinery. And it was a letter to my parents offering a settlement of $3,000. They settled for 3,000 dollars…we could have all died!” said Bowles.
Others, like Todd Drummond’s family, demanded that the refinery purchase their damaged home to help them move away. “Some of the people on the other side of the road decided to stay. They just took a check and decided to stay. We took more because we were like, “we’re out of here,” right? I think everybody beside us down to where the two houses burned down..all the way down to that house that’s in the cul-de-sac; we all sold to the refinery and everybody left,” said Drummond.
Eight months later, there was another fire at the refinery, but no one had to evacuate, and there were no casualties.
Today, The refinery is run by Citgo Petroleum Corporation, and the city of Doraville says it has implemented safety measures — 24-hour surveillance, alarm systems and regular inspections of the area.
