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Quick actions saved lives

Thursday, May 23, 2002

By Cindi Lash and Dan Gigler, Post-Gazette Staff Writers

A gasoline tanker truck tipped over on a sharp curve and burst into flames last night in an Esplen convenience store's parking lot, quickly igniting the store's gas pumps and leaking streams of flaming fuel into sewers and nearby Chartiers Creek.

	A firefighter sprays foam on a blazing gasoline tanker that tipped over in a convenience store parking lot last night in Esplen, near McKees Rocks. The driver was the only person injured. (Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette)

The crash at 6:45 p.m. ruptured the truck's tank, which contained 8,500 gallons of gasoline, and triggered an inferno with 80-foot-high pillars of flame near the city's boundary with McKees Rocks. The flames gave off choking black smoke that sent a plume into the sky that could be seen as far away as Cranberry.

The fire engulfed a car parked at the convenience store, but did not trigger an explosion in either the tanker or the underground gasoline storage tanks at the Sunoco Mini Market, which hold 20,000 to 30,000 gallons of fuel.

A quick-thinking clerk was credited with helping to prevent a larger catastrophe by hitting a switch that cut off the fuel flow to the gas pumps.

"It's a miracle that no one was killed," Pittsburgh Fire Chief Peter J. Micheli Jr. said.

"There were people in the store, paying for their gas, when this happened and they weren't hurt. We were very lucky."

The driver of the truck, identified by city police as John LaRocka, 32, of Oakdale, was the only person injured in the crash and resulting fire. He was taken to Mercy Hospital, where he was being treated last night for first- and second-degree burns to his head, arms and upper body.

The truck crashed while LaRocka was driving out of McKees Rocks and into the city near the McKees Rocks Plaza shopping center. He was rounding a 90-degree left turn from Stafford Street onto Stanhope Street when the truck tipped onto its side into the Sunoco parking lot, directly across from the shopping center.

Jim Koffler, 66, was manning the grill at a Wendy's restaurant in the shopping plaza when he heard customers and co-workers exclaiming about the crash.

"I started across the bridge [that carries Stafford Street across Chartiers Creek] to find out what the hell happened, when I started hearing pops," said Koffler, who served in a military fire brigade during the Korean War. Koffler said he knew those "pops" were small explosions and meant that a bigger fire would soon follow.

"The flames were going up as high as that pole," Koffler said, pointing to a utility pole that stood about 75 feet high. Flames pulsed from the truck, "nine or 10 times. Each time it was flame then smoke, flame then smoke."

"It never went 'BOOM!' like a bomb though," he said. "Thank God, that thing wasn't pressurized."

Police said they could not immediately determine the owner of the truck or where it was headed, but they said the Sunoco Mini Market was not its destination. Some witnesses initially said they believed an oncoming car cut off the truck in mid-turn, but investigators now believe that LaRocka lost control when the load shifted, police Lt. Joseph Campisi said.

After crashing onto its side, the truck's tank ruptured and immediately caught fire.

Inside the store, clerk Mark Khamar saw and heard the truck roll over and yelled to customers to get out. Before he ran out himself, however, Khamar flipped the "kill" switch that prevents gas from feeding from the store's underground tanks to the pumps

That helped to prevent the 15,000 gallons of gasoline that had been delivered to the station yesterday morning from further feeding the flames and helping them to spread to a warehouse filled with highly flammable paint and other supplies next door, Campisi said.

"I am just so glad he did this," said store owner David Vakil of Mt. Lebanon. "Because he did this, many people weren't hurt and I am very glad about that. Everything else can be fixed."

Also helping to reduce the risk of a catastrophic explosion was the way the tanker ruptured when it hit the ground, Micheli said. The crash caused so much damage to the tanker that it quickly spilled much of its load, minimizing internal pressure that could have caused its front and back ends to explode into lethal missiles.

"Those ends [of the tanker], if they had exploded, would have killed anyone in their path," said Micheli, who praised firefighters and other emergency workers for bringing the three-alarm blaze under control without other serious injuries or damage.

"We have training experience for a tanker going over. We drill on what you see here," he said. "The firefighters did an excellent job [to] protect the building and mitigate the fire as quickly as they could."

Still, the small explosions that occurred when flames reached the gas tank of the car and other parts of the tanker truck alarmed many residents of homes perched on the hillside above the Mini Market.

"I didn't hear the booms until I got outside," said Marion Dellasalla. She was cooking dinner for her family in her house on Radcliff Street in Esplen when her dog "started going crazy."

"When I saw the flames, I thought the gas station exploded. I thought about leaving the neighborhood with my kids to be safe, and my keys and cell phone are still on the porch."

No homes or businesses were evacuated. Some of the burning fuel drained into storm sewers and then into Chartiers Creek, but firefighters used special foam to choke off those fires.

They also sprayed the truck with hundreds of gallons of foam that is made especially to extinguish petrol- and alcohol-based accelerants.

The foam creates a vapor barrier which seals off the air supply, smothering the fire. Firefighters remained on the scene through the night and continued to spray foam to prevent the fire from spreading while they allowed the gasoline to burn off.

Chief John Walsh of the city's Hazardous Materials Team said that the foam and gas didn't appear to pose any serious environmental threat to the creek or the nearby Ohio River. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Environmental Protection and the Coast Guard all were notified of the fuel spill in the creek, police said.

"Some of [the fuel] is in the sewer system, some is in the creek, but most of it burned off," Walsh said, adding that teams would be taking meter readings of toxins in the river.

Micheli estimated damage at about $250,000.