By: Qinwei Wu

Two people were killed on Saturday in a boat fire. According to the Long Beach Fire Department, three other were injured as well.

The boat was reportedly said to be near a fueling dock in Alamitos Bay in the 200 block of Marina Drive, and it had caught on fire at around 5 pm.

On a post on Facebook, the Long Beach Fire Department said, “The fire required multiple land-based and marine-based resources to extinguish the fire. The fire has been extinguished, and resources continue to operate at the incident.”

According to the Long Beach Fire Captain Jake Heflin, five people were involved in the incident. Two women in their 60s were killed, and the three others had been transferred by paramedics to hospitals with burn-related injuries.

People on nearby boats reported to have heard a powerful blast, and bystanders were trying to put out the fire. A host at the nearby Crab Pot restaurant, Daniel Quinn, said to have heard a loud explosion, “like someone landed on the roof.”

As the firefighters arrived on the scene, there were clouds of thick black smoke and flames. “There was a big bang and I looked up, and there was this ginormous plume of black smoke,” Quinn said.

Long Beach firefighters had “knocked a good portion of the fire out” with water cannons, Heflin said, and they had help from the Orange County Fire Authority to put out the flames as well.

The boat was destroyed in the flames, and the cause of the boat fire is still under investigation. “Initial reports indicated they were in the process of doing some type of refueling operation, or had just completed a fueling operation.”, Heflin said, according to KABC.