Oversight of Refineries Is Lax, Report Says
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 21, 2007; Page D01
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has a poor record of oversight of the nation's oil and chemical refineries, says a new report on the fatal 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas.
The report by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board said OSHA had not done a planned comprehensive inspection of process safety at any U.S. oil refinery between 1995 and March 2005, when the Texas City explosion took place.
  The March 2005 accident at BP's Texas City refinery that killed 15 workers could have been prevented, the Chemical Safety Board report said. (By Dwight Andrews -- Associated Press) |
Investigators for the board said OSHA has fewer than a dozen inspectors for 2,816 high-priority facilities covered by process safety standards that, if enforced, might have avoided the accident that killed 15 workers and injured many more at BP's Texas City refinery.
Although OSHA had investigated injuries and isolated deaths at the Texas City plant -- what safety experts call "slips and trips" -- it had not inspected the safety of the plant's industrial processes since 1998, the report said, even though process failures were capable of causing catastrophic accidents.
"OSHA's capability to inspect highly hazardous facilities and to enforce process safety regulations is insufficient," the report said.
The head of OSHA, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Edwin G. Foulke Jr., declined to comment. He issued a statement saying that OSHA had levied the largest fine in its history against BP and that it expects to conduct 100 refinery inspections this year.
The chemical safety board, an independent agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents, also added to earlier evidence that top BP executives had focused on cutting expenses at the refinery despite warnings about safety problems at the plant.
"Decisions to cut budgets were made at the highest levels of BP Group despite serious safety deficiencies at Texas City," the agency said in its final report on the accident's causes. "Cost-cutting . . . left the Texas City refinery vulnerable to a catastrophe," it said.
Despite deep budget cuts at the refinery when it was owned by Amoco in the 1990s, BP cut an additional 25 percent in early 1999 after taking it over. It eliminated maintenance supervisors, control room operators and training programs. BP sought cuts again in 2003 and 2005.
The report issued yesterday noted that the central training department staff had been reduced to eight from 28, that key equipment operators had been working 12-hour shifts for 29 to 37 consecutive days, and that there were multiple equipment failures.
The chemical safety board's lead investigator, Don Holmstrom, said that audit reports "indicated a history of budget cuts and underfunding at this facility that led to significant problems with its mechanical integrity."
Lawyers for people injured in the blast have been trying to attach blame to senior BP executives. Without naming anyone, the report identifies the titles of BP executives who received safety warnings. They included the group chief executive for refining and marketing, John Manzoni, and the group vice president for refining, Mike Hoffman.
In 2002, the director of BP's South Houston region told London managers that the refinery's infrastructure was "in complete decline." He commissioned a study that said its "urgent and far-reaching" findings showed "the potential for a major site incident."
In August 2002, a warning was sent to at least one member of BP's executive board, the report said. A note to BP's global chief executive for refining and marketing in July 2004 warned that BP's failure to invest in new hardware would place "greater demands" on staff "within the shrinking margin for error." In February 2005, before the accident, the plant's health and safety manager said in an e-mail, "I truly believe that we are on the verge of something bigger happening."
"Warning signs of a possible disaster were present for several years, but company officials did not intervene effectively to prevent it," the report said.
BP issued a statement accepting responsibility for the accident: "Notwithstanding the Company's strong disagreement with some of the content of the CSB report, particularly many of the findings and conclusions, BP will give full and careful consideration to CSB's recommendations," the company said.
