01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, July 20, 2006

BY TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Inside Ladder 1, Lt. Brian Mahoney and firefighter Joe Moreino heard another thunderous boom overhead and watched a bolt of lightning illuminate the huge petroleum storage tanks clustered along the riverfront.

Several hundred feet away, balls of fire rose into the night above a dock in the Port of Providence. Already the fire's heat pressed against the men's faces.

The Providence River, they could see on their approach, was on fire. And it appeared the tanker -- docked beside a disconnected hose or pipe, now belching fuel -- was burning, too.

Another bolt of lightning.

Mahoney and Moreino would say later that the call to Tuesday night's port fire was the most dangerous in their 34 collective years as firefighters and that the potential for an unimaginable disaster was, in Mahoney's words, "tremendous."

"If they didn't pull that ship out and that ship went up, there would have been a big problem," Mahoney said. "Those tanks are in a very vulnerable area," with thousands of people living within a mile radius and the state's only Level One trauma center, Rhode Island Hospital, perilously close. "Let's just say we are very fortunate."

It was a second alarm Tuesday night that called Mahoney, Moreino and the rest of the Ladder 1's crew out of the Fire Department's headquarters on Washington Street and had them heading for the port.

As predicted, a severe thunderstorm packing destructive winds and toppling trees tore through the downtown area.

Minutes before, at 10:37 p.m. another fire truck, Engine 13 out of the Allens Avenue station and on a call for a downed wire, reported seeing a fireball rise over the port. Engine 13 diverted to the port, driving into one of the most potentially dangerous environments in Rhode Island, where millions of gallons of home heating fuel, diesel, jet fuel and gasoline are stored.

The smoke was so intense, firefighters could not immediately make out the stern of the ship sticking out into the river, or see the end of the dock. They wondered if another ship laden with petroleum products might be out there, as well.

Fuel tankers dock and unload several hundred feet from shore as a safety measure. The fuel travels through pipes along the dock and then inland, where it is diverted to two dozen storage tanks.

As lightning arced over their heads, Mahoney and Moreino waited apprehensively for port workers to manually turn a valve at the closest end of the dock to stem the supply of gasoline feeding the fire.

"You don't want to quickly commit a lot of resources until you know what you're dealing with," Mahoney said.

While they waited, they took in their surroundings.

"It was an incredible sight," said Mahoney. "The whole skyline was lit up. There were fireballs exploding in the air, all this tremendous lightning, and all around this ship countless tanks of different kinds of fuel products."

The gasoline spilling from the pipeline and the aging pier's timbers provided the fire's fuel and the firefighters' biggest fears.

"If we didn't get those valves shut down as quickly as we did," Mahoney said, "we wouldn't have been able to eventually fight the fire as aggressively as we did."

Moreino said firefighters could see the crew of the 600-foot ship, the Nordeuropa, directing water hoses on the ship and the dock. Crew members had already cut the mooring lines as they tried to get the ship away from the dock as fast as possible.

Moreino said it took the crew between 15 and 30 minutes to get the ship away from the dock. Had they not worked so fast, and had firefighters not worked so well, "the situation could have been a lot worse," Moreino said.

With help from a crew from T.F. Green Airport, experienced in extinguishing fuel fires, firefighters first spread foam along the dock to starve the fire of the oxygen it needed to burn. For almost three hours the fire burned up the estimated 8,000 to 10,000 gallons of gasoline that was left in the pipeline between the ship and the shutoff valve. Eventually more than 170 firefighters were called to the scene, fighting the fire with foam and water.

Fire officials declared the blaze under control at about 1 a.m.

While some portions of the 1,000-foot dock still burned yesterday afternoon, Mahoney said: "I imagine those people who were planning on putting those LNG tanks in there had a setback."

tmooney@projo.com / (401) 277-7359