You need to understand that emergency flares are designed to be on fire when needed.
Say you have a vessel designed for a particular pressure of a flammable gas. If the pressure gets too high (for whatever reason due to process or control issues), the alternatives are to let the vessel explode (bad), let explosive gasses loose (potential for explosion if an ignition source is contacted), or to purposely burn the gas off (flare).
These types of fires are not pleasant as they represent lost product ($), and environmental regulation hassles, but they are preferable to the alternatives.
We do understand that having had the safety training and witnessing prior incidents in which workers were killed at these two refineries. In a few hours we may learn more details about what happened. Understand, the posted picture is what the scene looked like about 2 and a half hours after the fires started at about 6PM. By the time the picture was taken most of the flame and smoke had been subdued. The flames were much larger than what is pictured later, and one of the other sources of the flames was in the vicinity of the vapor-smoke column seen to the left of the flame above the storage tank. Although it was difficult to see the small details, it looked as though there were smaller fires near ground level between those locations.
I don’t want to exagerrate the extent of the incident, but it was large enough and impressive enough to attract a large crowd of onlookers because of the unusual size of the fires and smoke columns and number of them which did not appear to be coming from the usual flare stacks. Later today there will likely be some further information about what happened.