Second fire at Barrett plant

Oceanside and Island Park firefighters put out a small fire at the E. F. Barrett Power Station on Jan. 20 — the second blaze to occur in the past month.

The power station, at 1 McCarthy Rd. on Barnum’s Channel, is owned by National Grid, and is run on natural gas and oil-fired steam. No injuries or outages were reported as a result of the fire, which utility company representatives said was extinguished within the hour.

“We found the root cause, which was the exhaust stack, and we are doing additional work on that unit and replacing equipment,” said National Grid in a statement.

The first fire happened three weeks before, on Dec. 30, in a unit connected to one of the gas combustion turbines. The blaze was reported in the late afternoon, and no injuries or outages were reported.

Anthony D’Esposito, who serves as chief of the Island Park Fire Department, said both the Oceanside and Island Park departments were called in to put out the fire. Although the station is in the Island Park district, its main entrance is closer to the Oceanside Fire Department, so they responded first.

“It was extinguished very quickly,” D’Esposito said.

According to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, Barrett Power Station first went operational in 1956 as a single unit facility, with a second steam-generating unit added in 1963; each of the units has a generating capacity of 175 megawatts. The facility also houses 12 combustion turbines that date back more than 40 years, and produce up to 305 megawatts in total.

Despite having two fires in the past month, National Grid does not consider this a long-term concern, and representatives said they were addressing the issue.