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GREENSBORO — Workers at the scene of a massive weekend gasoline tank fire spent Monday on mop-up duty, working to remove the remnants of more than 2,200 gallons of specialized foam used to extinguish the blaze.

The foam, injected into the 52,000-barrel-capacity tank, is being put into a retaining pond on site where it will be monitored, said Steve Baker, a spokesman for Georgia-based Colonial Pipelines, which owns the tank farm.

“They have an environmental team that is monitoring the leftover foam and water,” Baker said. “The EPA said it is safe to get rid of, but ... (we are) monitoring it to ensure we don’t do anything to the environment.”

Authorities said the fire started about 12:45 a.m. Sunday from a lightning strike at the tank farm at 411 Gallimore Dairy Road. It took the Greensboro Fire Department and other emergency agencies about five and a half hours to put it out.

Fire officials credited excellent training, company cooperation and weather as reasons the fire did not become a catastrophe. Nearby businesses were closed and traffic was light.

“The gods were shining on us,” said Assistant Fire Chief David Douglas. “It was a once-in-a-career type fire.”

The tank that caught fire on the edge of the Colonial property was among the smaller containers at the farm. And the weather cooperated.

“Although weather caused it, when the weather cleared out, we didn’t have any wind,” Douglas said. “Had we had heavy winds blowing either east or west into one of the exposed tanks, we would have had a problem.”

Douglas said he wanted to correct an erroneous report — that the tank exploded.

“What you heard is thunder,” Douglas said. “These tanks will not explode. They will burn violently, but it is not cataclysmic.”

The tank, which stood 51 feet tall and 80 feet wide, burned about halfway to the ground.

It held about 20,000 barrels of gasoline, but the company removed about 7,500 barrels from the tank through underground pipes during the blaze.

In all, the company lost an estimated 4,500 barrels of gasoline, though officials with the fire department and the company have called the environmental impact minimal.

Baker said once the foam is cleaned up, the company will consider building a replacement.

“It’s going to take the rest of the week to sift through what happened and plan our next steps,” Baker said.

The tank, one of 72 on the site, was equipped with a system designed to ground lightning strikes, but it failed. The cause of the failure is under investigation.

Baker did not give any cost estimates on damage or cleanup.

Colonial’s Greensboro tank farm, which sits along Interstate 40, is the largest of the company’s 15 tank farms.

 The burned tank was original to the farm built in 1963.

It is part of a network of 5,500-miles of underground pipes that runs from Houston to New York City, Baker said.

The pipes deliver more than 100 million gallons of various types of fuel daily, including gasoline, heating fuel, diesel and military jet fuel, among other products, Baker said.

“They are really not storage facilities,” he said. “They are used to facilitate the movement of products. To make our system work, we need to be able to remove one product (from the pipeline) and put another one in and get it moved.”

Staff Writer Don Patterson contributed to this report.

Contact Ryan Seals at 373-7077 or ryan.seals@news-record.com