A towering column of flame and black smoke rose over Visakhapatnam on Monday night when a fire broke out at the HPCL Visakh Refinery, one of India’s oldest oil plants on the east coast. The company says the blaze was contained quickly, nobody was hurt and its core processing equipment came through undamaged. The fire still revived uncomfortable questions about safety at a site with a long record of industrial accidents.
Around 10 pm on Monday, the port city was shaken by a column of fire and thick black smoke from the HPCL Vizag refinery. HPCL said the fire was reported at the pitch intermediate storage tank at about 10 pm on November 2, and the refinery’s fire and safety team activated its firefighting and emergency response measures. The company said the fire stayed confined to the pitch tank area and was brought under control within a short time. Accounts differ on who fought it. A circle inspector said HPCL’s own fire tenders put out the blaze without outside help, while the revenue divisional officer said Andhra Pradesh Fire Department equipment was also used.
Pitch is the heavy, tarry residue left once fuels have been distilled out of crude oil. The tank in question holds that thick residue. That makes it a high-volume, high-heat storage point, and a fire there produces dense smoke that carries across the city, which explains the dramatic sight residents saw.
The damage
The reported toll is light. An HPCL official confirmed to PTI that there were no deaths or injuries. HPCL said on Tuesday that the fire caused no damage to the process units, which suggests little effect on output. The extent of damage to the tank itself, the quantity of pitch involved and the cause of the fire have not been disclosed. HPCL stressed its safety record in its statement. The company said it remains committed to the highest standards of safety and emergency preparedness.
Why the refinery matters
The Visakh refinery is central to India’s fuel supply on the eastern seaboard. It began as the country’s first east coast refinery, commissioned in 1957 by Caltex Oil Refining India, and was nationalised in 1976 before merging with HPCL in 1978. It has grown sharply since then. Its capacity is now 15 million tonnes a year, and in FY26 it processed a record 16.04 million tonnes of crude. Its products include LPG, naphtha, petrol, aviation turbine fuel, diesel, bitumen and sulphur. Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised the commissioning of the refinery’s residue upgradation facility in January, part of the expansion that lifted it to its present capacity.
A site with a troubled history
The fire adds to a pattern that worries safety observers. It follows recent blazes at refineries in Pachpadra, Mathura and Vadodara, and the Visakh plant has a record of deadly accidents stretching back to 1997. One of the worst came in 2013, when six workers died and more than 30 were injured in a cooling tower fire during the plant’s expansion, and the state government ordered an inquiry. The criticism now centres on follow-through. What sets the plant apart is the gap between inquiries promised after each fire and the answers made public.
The immediate questions are what ignited the fire, how much product was lost, and whether the pitch tank can return to service quickly. A cause-finding inquiry, if one is ordered and published, would carry more weight than the company’s initial statement, particularly at a refinery that has just completed a major expansion and now runs above its rated capacity. For residents of Visakhapatnam, who watched the flames from across the city, a clear public explanation matters as much as the quick control of the fire.
