The explosion was reported about 3:30 a.m. at the Williams Production Co. field plant on County Road 307. The boom shook homes and woke residents.

"It was really loud," said Diane Millich, who lives three-fourths of a mile from the plant. "It was insane. It was like an M-80. It just startled everybody."

A cooling tower at the plant caught fire and exploded, sending debris outward and setting fire to several outbuildings - including a control room, said Sara Delgado, spokeswoman for Williams, speaking by phone from Tulsa, Okla.

Firefighters evacuated three homes and made reverse-911 calls to homes within a half-mile radius of the plant.

Seven employees were at the plant at the time of the explosion, Delgado said. Had the explosion occurred during the day, many more employees may have been on site, she said. About 40 employees work around the facility, she said.

No one was injured in the explosion or in fighting the blaze.

Larry Behrens, chief of the Los Pinos Fire Protection District, was first on scene.

"We had some secondary explosions after I got here, and it still shook the ground," he said. "So I'm sure the initial one was large enough to let people know that something was going on."

When Behrens arrived, he found the workers standing in a safe zone on the road. They told him the electricity went out, and when they went outside to see what happened, the cooling tower exploded. The tower, a circular structure that stands several stories tall, appeared to have a large gash in it, either from the explosion or the fire.

The plant was purged of all petroleum products and depressurized in accordance with emergency protocols. Because of the hazardous materials on site, firefighters were unable to make an immediate attack, said Dan Noonan, chief of the Durango Fire & Rescue Authority.

"We basically allowed a certain amount of the fire to burn itself down to nothing until we felt it was safe," he said.

Numerous firefighting agencies from surrounding communities, including Farmington and Pagosa Springs, assisted.

The plant is capable of processing about 450 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. It can also produce about 24,000 barrels of gas liquids per day, which include propane, butane and other byproducts. It produces about 3,300 barrels of propane per day, some of which is distributed to local suppliers, Delgado said.

During the first half of this year, La Plata County averaged 32.6 billion cubic feet of gas each month, according to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. So if the plant processed a maximum capacity, it would have processed about 41 percent of the county's gas production. It could not be verified Wednesday whether the facility truly processed that percentage.

The plant's infrastructure and the property it sits on have an assessed value of about $11.5 million, said County Assessor Craig Larson. The county collects about $75,800 per year in property taxes from those assets, he said. That doesn't include tax money the county collects from the gas production that is processed there.

Gas production has a higher tax value to the county than the property taxes, he said. It was not immediately possible to calculate the tax benefit derived from the gas production that is processed at the facility.

Delgado said the company rerouted about 100 million cubic feet of the plant's normal production to other plants in the San Juan Basin and will continue to reroute additional production.

It was unknown how long the plant will be shut down.

Such disasters are extremely rare, Delgado said. They can occur when hurricanes whip through the Gulf Coast, she said, but in 11 years, she hasn't seen a similar situation.

"They just have to get in there and see exactly what the plan is going to be as far as getting the plant up and running," Delgado said.

Behrens estimated that only about 10 percent of the overall plant was damaged, but the cooling towers and the control room are critical components.

"The brains of the whole thing is the building that is on fire - that we're working on right now," Behrens said. "It's not like you can put a Band-Aid on it and it will be up and running tomorrow."

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