BP Amoco Texas City Explosion

[1369]

The BP refinery suffered an explosion in one of the gas refining units earlier today. So far I've heard they have 4 fatailties. My company is working there. We have 3 injured, but have accounted for all our people.

[MannyIsGod]

Man, that's crazy. Cause of the accident? I know when I worked for Valero (UDS), Refinery saftey was something they were extremely proud of.

[Winehole23]

“The Texas City disaster was caused by organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation,” the federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board concluded in its 2007 assessment (http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.csb.gov%2Fassets%2F1%2F19%2 FCSBFinalReportBP.pdf&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFrgD1Ryr88EVM0kKi1_K7L0TJ-MQ). “Warning signs of a possible disaster were present for several years, but company officials did not intervene effectively to prevent it.”



Federal health and safety regulators failed to spot those vulnerabilities before it was too late.


The accident — now one of the most studied in U.S. history — triggered promises from the industry and regulators to invest in safety. New guidelines, new safety programs and more training came next.


But is the industry any safer 10 years after the blast? The Texas Tribune and the Houston Chronicle joined forces to find out. Though no single incident has matched the 2005 devastation, a two-month investigation finds the industry’s overall death toll barely slowed.
http://apps.texastribune.org/blood-lessons/

[Winehole23]

All 15 contractors killed that warm afternoon were working with Leining and other BP employees in or near the group of office trailers that BP had placed on refinery grounds to house workers during a turnaround — industry lingo for shutdowns, maintenance and startups — the most dangerous time at a refinery.


Most had just returned from a safety lunch elsewhere at the refinery. Without warning, operators tried to restart a nearby unit that boosts the octane of gasoline. A stream of flammable liquids shot from an obsolete vent stack, triggering a series of massive explosions that ripped apart the refinery’s 1,200 acres and shook nearby homes.

[Winehole23]

In the decade since the Texas City disaster, the problems that triggered it continue to pop up in probes of subsequent accidents, said Daniel M. Horowitz, a longtime top CSB official.


Tesoro’s Puget Sound refinery, just north of Seattle, saw the deadliest accident of the past decade. On April 2, 2010, a damaged heat exchanger ruptured, spewing 500-degree gases that engulfed the unit in a toxic orange cloud that killed seven workers. The death toll was so high, the CSB concluded (http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.csb.gov%2Fassets%2F1%2F7%2F Tesoro_Anacortes_2014-May-01.pdf&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGXJT5W78AKD-zgHd4svLrnXJe9oA), in part because a supervisor failed to evacuate unneeded staff during the hazardous maintenance procedure. Though just one operator could do the job, the supervisor standing near the equipment asked five others to help.

[Winehole23]

The public can easily search data at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which records deaths and injuries reported across all industries. But typing the code for “Petroleum Refining” — 2911 — into the agency’s query tool only reveals a small fraction of all who died at refineries.


Oil refiners have increasingly contracted out some of their most dangerous jobs to companies that are classified elsewhere in the federal system.


The many categories include “3443, Fabricated Plate Work,” “1799, Special Trade Contractors, Not Elsewhere Classified” and “1629, Heavy Construction, Not Elsewhere Classified.”


In the 2005 Texas City blast, for instance, all of the 15 workers killed were contractors. None of their deaths show up in the federal government’s annual tally for the refining industry.


The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking contractors’ deaths at refineries for the first time in 2011, but still misses incidents, records show.

http://apps.texastribune.org/blood-lessons/data/