When the images of a situation in the news might plausibly be captioned “Godzilla makes appearance in Gulf,” or “portal to hell opens wide,” or “chunk of sun falls into ocean,” it’s a pretty good sign that things have gone badly. But actually, the idea that a Kaiju might have been wandering beneath the waters off Mexico might have been better than the truth. Because on Friday, Mexico’s state oil company, Pemex, managed to set the ocean on fire.

The flames were the result of an underwater pipeline rupture near the Ku Maloob Zaap oil platform about 70 miles off the Yucatan coast. When natural gas from that pipeline caught fire, it resulted in a thousand-yard patch of ocean that was literally boiling. A vortex of flames developed around house-sized bubbles of methane that burst from the surface of the sea. The result was not just the incredible images of the ocean on fire, but even stranger image,s like that featured above, in which a group of ships are trying to put out the ocean by pumping water onto it.

The flames eventually subsided more than five hours later, after Pemex was apparently able to close the valves leading to the leaking pipe. This particular accident doesn’t seem to have come with a death toll—at least, not a human death toll—and for Pemex, that’s saying something. Because, as Statista notes, the company has a long history of making historically bad mistakes. including a series of explosions with with triple-digit body counts.

The official statement from Pemex officials on Friday’s event insisted that there was “no spill,” which might be true in the sense that the world wasn’t left to deal with billions of gallons of oil spread out across the Gulf (see Deepwater Horizon, or basically any undersea oil platform). Yet it was certainly not true in the sense that they released massive amounts of one of the most potent greenhouse gases while setting the ocean on fire. It’s also not true in the sense that this is another example of pollution from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels—a process that kills one in five people. 

But as a symbol of just how awful this process really is, it was hard to beat.