Fatal refinery blast shows wider problems in industry, safety official says

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_3028

Fatal refinery blast shows wider problems in industry, safety official says
By Mark Gruenberg

12 April 2007

WASHINGTON - The fatal March 23, 2005, explosion at British Petroleum's Texas City, Texas, refinery exposed problems in regulation of U.S. industry, including the petrochemical industry, that stretch far beyond one company and its culture of ignoring safety, a top federal prober of the blast says.

Testifying before the House Education and Labor Committee in the first of a series of oversight hearings on workplace safety, Carolyn Merritt, chair of the independent U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, had harsh words for BP, the petrochemical industry, other firms--and federal regulators.

The big problem, she said, is that companies, including BP, focus on probing accidents after the fact and talk about individual workers and violations and individual death-and-injury data, which have been declining.

But they ignore what are called "process safety management" violations--long histories of problems in safety processes at one site, such as Texas City. Those sagas are precursors of fatal accidents, as well as patterns of violations that could tip off both the firms and regulators about looming disasters.

Firms also ignore or don't keep track of "near misses" at other industrial sites that escaped fatal consequences only by luck. And the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has had the authority for 11 years--under GOP and Democratic administrations--to conduct "process safety" inspections of industrial sites, but has never done so, she said.

The Texas City blast killed 15 workers and injured more than 170, when an outdated piece of equipment--a blowdown drum, which OSHA told BP 13 years ago it should replace--broke down and let loose the equivalent of an entire tanker truck of gasoline into the refinery area. The gas vaporized, a spark ignited it and it exploded.

FULL article at link.

[MikeNearMcChord]

1. Fix these problems?

And let the oil companies blow their profits? No massive retirement packages for Jabba the Hutt CEO's?