Explosion At Oil Refinery Raises Questions About Oil Industry Accountability
The explosion at the BP Texas City refinery on March 23, 2005 and its aftermath have opened the question of accountability that BP and indeed the whole oil industry holds. Two reports, one from the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) and one from BP itself both point to serious management problems. Safety is not the highest priority, producing gasoline is. It took the tragic loss of 15 workers and the injury to over 170 more to underline the fact that refineries as a whole are basically accidents waiting to happen.
Management is a key issue. Many procedures are overlooked or outright ignored because the incentive is to keep production at the highest levels possible. In the BP report of December 9, 2005, the company stated that it found “no evidence of anyone consciously or intentionally taking actions or decisions that put others at risk.” The scary conclusion is that those on-site at the time of the accident did not realize the danger – in short, they didn’t know what they were doing. In fact, training has become less of a focus for the company since 1998. At that point, the Texas City plant had 38 trainers; at the time of the accident there were nine.
Traditionally, oil companies blame the workers for not following safety procedures but the BP report does admit that management played a role, and management issues were a critical factor leading up to the explosion. The CSB agrees wholeheartedly. In September 2005, BP was fined $21 million for 300 infractions connected with the accident and two other incidents after that time.
Now $21 million sounds like a lot of money, but for a multi-billion dollar corporation it’s sort of like giving a millionaire a $10 parking fine. A mild embarrassment maybe, but certainly not a financial penalty that will make any real impact.
BP itself has said that it will commit $1 billion over five years to fix the problems at its Texas City plant. This again sounds impressive, but in comparison it is nothing. For the first three quarters in 2005, BP made $15 billion in profits, and had revenues of $350 billion in 2004. To put this in perspective, Star Wars, by far the most successful movie franchise, has grossed $13 billion in thirty years.
Yet despite the huge amount of money flowing into the oil companies, and the extreme hazards of refining oil, a good deal of the equipment is aging. For example, the equipment that exploded at BP had been showing signs of replacement or major repair for years and in the words of the CSB, never should have been started up. Employees at the same plant had expressed concerns before the explosion that pipes were corroding at unknown levels, and equipment was operated with identified problems on a regular basis.
Companies do not want to properly maintain, repair, or replace equipment because downtime costs money. Small fines and relatively minor court settlements to the families of killed or injured workers are just the cost of doing business. Until either the oil industry starts taking safety concerns seriously, or until government starts handing down fines in the billions of dollars, “management issues” and failing equipment will keep refineries at the status quo: literally a bomb waiting to go off at any time.
If you or a loved one has been injured on the job at a refinery, contact attorney David I. Fuchs at 800-570-2858.