where it might have done incalculable damage, but the company's engineering forces put up fifty-five thousand barrel tanks at the rate of one every four and a half days. Last year Cerro Azul shot a million and a half barrels into the air before it could be controlled. But here again the company's forces saved, by earth dams, more than half of this, and then for safety burned the overflow. There is no evidence as to the number of oil gushers that may burst forth in the future, but knowledge of how to handle them has increased.
And speaking of the standard fifty-five-thousand-barrel steel oil tanks, the reader may be interested to know that they are thirty feet high and one hundred and fifteen feet in diameter, are usually surrounded by an earth dam to save the oil in case of accident, and have usually a bottom valve through which the oil may be drawn off if a bolt of lightning fires the tank.
The Mexican Petroleum Company on its thousand acres of ground at "Tankville" and at its Tampico terminal has one hundred and three of these tanks, but the eye will meet them at almost any railroad shipping point in the United States.
The first complete monthly shipments were
