A huge fire at an oil refinery near Iran's capital was contained on Thursday after raging for two days. There were no casualties and firefighters extinguished the flames, state media reported Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said that "firefighters finally prevented the spread of flames [from the burning storage tank] to other adjacent tanks.. All operations were suspended at the Tondguyan refinery as firefighters tried to contain the blaze, said Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency. A spokesman for the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company told state TV that a storage tank with 20,000 barrels of petrol caught fire. “A leak at a liquid gas pipeline at the facility sparked the fire,” Mansour Darajati, the head of Tehran's crisis management organisation, told state TV. Mr Darajati said that the fire had begun about 7:30pm and state television reported that 18 oil reservoirs had caught fire. The Tehran Oil Refining Company, which runs the refinery and is a subsidiary of the state-run National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company, ruled out sabotage as a cause, the semi-official Iranian Students’ News Agency reported. Ten ambulances were sent out, a spokesman for Iran's emergency department told Isna. Hospitals in the area were also on standby. Mr Zanganeh said that the production at the refinery, which has a daily refining capacity of 220,000 barrels of oil, was not affected and there were no fuel shortages as a result of the damage. Temperatures in the Iranian capital reached nearly 40°C on Wednesday. Summer weather in Iran has caused fires in the past. Industrial accidents are also common in Iran. On May 23, nine people were injured in a blast at a plant producing explosive materials in central Iran, local media reported, while three days later, a pipeline explosion at a petrochemical complex near Iran's Gulf coast left one dead. The blaze came the same day a fire broke out on the largest ship in the Iranian navy, which later sank in the Gulf of Oman.
