Power has been restored to BP's sprawling oil refinery in northwest Indiana following an outage that led the company to temporarily close the complex and evacuate workers, BP said Friday.
BP spokeswoman Christina Audisho said in a statement that power returned to the refinery on Friday after Thursday's outage, and that the refinery's office buildings and nearby roads had reopened.
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He said “operations have stabilized at the refinery.” But Audisho did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press asking BP to provide more details about the situation at the refinery, including whether refining had resumed and whether the cause of the outage had been determined.
The BP Whiting refinery is photographed in East Chicago, Indiana, on September 21, 2017. (DroneBase via AP, Archive)
Audisho said all refinery personnel were accounted for and no injuries were reported following the outage at the refinery, located along Lake Michigan about 15 miles southeast of Chicago.
The city of Whiting said Thursday that the refinery was burning its smokestacks in response to the outage “to burn off extra product” in what was described as a “normal process” following such an event.
Audisho said in Friday's statement that air monitoring around the refinery continues “and no elevated readings have been recorded.”
The city of Whiting said air monitoring conducted at multiple locations by both BP and Lake County had determined there was “no danger to the public.”
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The refinery is the largest in the American Midwest and the sixth largest nationally, and processes about 440,000 barrels of crude oil per day, producing a variety of liquid fuels and asphalt.
