s after emerging from a crisis meeting in Ankara. „We can now say the fire is under control,“ said Ecevit, who had on Wednesday called the fire the most dangerous problem Turkey faced after the earthquake. Officials from the state oil refining company, Tupras, which owns the plant, said earlier in the day the fire „looked containable“. They said five storage tanks of naphtha and crude oil were still ablaze, while two other tank fires had burned out. An earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale hit northwest Turkey on Tuesday, its epicentre just outside Izmit where it ignited the refinery blaze, belching out a dense pall of smoke which caused some residents to report eye problems. Ismail Alakoc, chairman of Tupras, rejected accusations that the firefighters were negligent when the fire first broke out on a crude oil tank early on Tuesday. „Our teams, who are able to arrive in the fire zone in three minutes, arrived there after half an hour because most roads were destroyed by the earthquake,“ he told a news conference. „Most of fire extinguishing systems did not work because of power and water cuts after the earthquake,“ he said. Tupras‘s 226,000 barrel per day (bpd) Yarimca plant at Izmit had been evacuated for fear of explosions if the fire were to spread to nearby liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tanks. The refinery has about 80 tanks of different sizes in its tank farm. Firefighting planes from Turkey and foreign allies arrived on Wednesday and began dropping water and fire-retardant chemicals on the blaze as red flames and dense black smoke billowed into the sky. They resumed operation at daylight on Thursday and witnesses said the fire appeared to have died down. The U.S. military at the southern Turkish base of Incirlik was alerted to help extinguish the refinery fire, U.S. spokesman James Rubin told reporters in Washington. The Yarimca plant in Izmit is the largest of Tupras‘s four refineries in Turkey. Tupras, 96.42 percent owned by the state Privatisation Administration, is one of the linchpins of the country‘s privatisation programme. The Yarimca plant has an annual refining capacity of 11.5 million tonnes.