IZMIT, Turkey -- Two people were injured in a fire that destroyed a gas storage facility in northwest Turkey on Sunday, local officials said.

The fire started after an explosion at the Akcagaz liquid petroleum gas (LPG) storage center located near Turkey's largest oil refinery Tupras which was unaffected by the blast.

Firefighters brought the blaze under control and there were no immediate reports of any deaths.

"There was an explosion, and eight storage tanks caught fire, but it is now under control. The danger has passed," said Ramazan Yilmaz, Civil Defense chief at the Kocaeli provincial governor's office.

"Fires in eight to 10 nearby houses have been extinguished. There are reports of minor injuries, such as cuts from broken glass," he said, adding a few hundred people near the facility had been evacuated.

Akcagaz, which has a 660 cubic meter capacity and sells automotive LPG to distributors, was completely destroyed in the fire, petroleum officials said.

Helicopters dumped water from the nearby sea of Marmara onto flames that at one point climbed as high as 300 meters. Thick black smoke spread across much of the sky over the densely populated area.

The state-run Anatolian news agency reported earlier that the blast had occurred at Tupras, but Tupras Chairman and General Manager Husamettin Danis told Reuters the refinery was unaffected by the fire.

Yilmaz said it was unclear what had caused the blast, but Danis said a lorry tanker had caught fire while loading fuel at Akcagaz and flames had spread to nearby storage tanks.

Officials have expressed concern in the past about the location of the Akcagaz Plant because of its proximity to residential neighborhoods and the north Anatolian fault line, which was the site of a devastating earthquake in 1999 that killed more than 17,000 people.

"This facility was set up within Tupras' security zone despite protests from Tupras," said Kaya Baban, head of Turkey's Association of Petrol Industrialists.

Baban said Akcagaz was built in the late 1990s in Izmit with municipal permission. It is located near other facilities housing gasoline and lubricant products.

The mostly state-owned Tupras suffered massive damage from a fire caused by the 1999 earthquake.