Justin Worland
The 2019 fire at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery started with a simple failure: one leaky elbow pipe in a 1,400-acre facility covered with pipes, tanks and industrial towers.
Within a few hours last June, enough gaseous propane had seeped into the air to ignite the facility into a fiery hellscape with an explosion hurling human-size pieces of industrial equipment into the air and shaking the ground miles away.
Workers rapidly shut down the facility, which had for decades converted crude oil into usable products. The workers escaped with only a few minor injuries, but the facility had already spent decades killing its neighbors in South Philadelphia.
The refinery–the largest on the East Coast, dating back to the early days of the oil industry in the 19th century–was single-handedly responsible for more than half of the city’s cancer-causing air toxics.
