Firefighters extinguish blaze at Lebanese oil storage facility

Smoke rises from an oil facility in the southern town of Zahrani, south of the port city of Sidon, Lebanon (Hassan Ammar/AP)

Firefighters extinguished a huge blaze that broke out in a storage tank at one of Lebanon’s main oil facilities in the country’s south after it sent orange flames and a thick black column of smoke into the sky.

The country’s energy minister Walid Fayad said the fire broke out when workers were transferring petrol from one storage tank to another in the coastal town of Zahrani.