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GREENSBORO — Greensboro’s firefighters were so well trained, drilled and equipped to put out gasoline fires that they did a near-perfect job on last Sunday’s fire at Colonial Pipeline, an international fire expert says.

“There are probably not 10 places in the United States that could do what your fire department did,” said David White, a former university professor and fire training expert who is the president of Fire and Safety Specialists of College Station, Texas.

White, whose company trains and assists firefighters from Saudi Arabia to the United States, remembers a trip to Greensboro 30 years ago for a local training session.

“I remember the people were very proactive,” he said.

Fighting a massive fire in a gasoline tank requires lots of planning, he said.

Well-prepared firefighters “know where to get the water and they know how to fight the fire. They’ve been trained, they know how much equipment they need,” White said. “Guess what? When the fire happened, they were ready. They applied the plan.”

The tank farm near Gallimore Dairy Road and Interstate 40 contains 72 gasoline tanks, making it one of the largest in the country. White said finished gasoline is piped to these tanks, where it is stored before being picked up for delivery in trucks.

The Greensboro Fire Department had worked closely with Colonial to set up plans, and Colonial played a part by installing special water connections for maximum flow.

“I’ll brag on Colonial Pipeline,” White said. “They’ve got to have thousands of tanks in the country and they have been working with local fire departments. When the day comes and they’ve got to bring all those toys to the party, it works.” 

But such tank farms are not as volatile or dangerous as the average person might think, he said, because of environmental regulations.

In recent decades, tank owners have been required to build geodesic domes to catch vapors that come from the top of a tank’s floating roof.

Those domes also tend to protect tanks from lightning strikes in addition to systems installed specifically to direct lightning bolts into the ground. Of the hundreds of thousands of tanks worldwide equipped with such domes, White said, he knows of only two that have ignited from lightning strikes: one in Mexico and the one last week in Greensboro. “It burned because ain’t nothing perfect,” he said. In general, though, “we haven’t had fires in them.”

White is a former firefighter who became a professor at Texas A&M University in 1970. He traveled the world teaching and learning firefighting techniques.

In the 1980s he started his own company. He publishes Industrial Fire World for firefighters and companies, organizes conferences and consults with fire departments.

“Tank fires are not rocket science. They just are big and they look dangerous and sometimes they are,” White said. And until the early 1980s, science had not caught up with fires. Cities just had to wait for fuel to burn off.

Now, with sophisticated foam and planning systems, cities can control tank fires.

The first big fire ever extinguished with modern methods was in the early ’80s in Louisiana, he said, and measured 160 feet in diameter. The Greensboro fire was about 120 feet in diameter, he said.

Good planning works time and again, he said,.

White said the biggest tank fire in history was in Louisiana, north of the New Orleans airport, on June 7, 2001.

He was on the team brought in to fight the fire.

Firefighters spent 12 hours setting up their hoses and foam equipment.

“We gave the signal: Turn on the foam,” he said. “Twenty minutes later the fire was knocked out ... and we went home.”

“It’s that easy?” someone asked him.

“It’s that easy if you do what I said,” he replied.

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com