Trimming the Bangs
posted by hedgehog in Bad People, Ecofascism, Government, Petrolatum |I know how low my expectations of U.S. government have fallen when, upon reading this report, I am not only furious but also relieved, like the time I hurled up a burger that had been out too long.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board decided to slam oil company BP for screwing the pooch on safety at its Texas City, Texas refinery and contributing to an explosion that killed 15 people and injured 180 in 2005. Their press release is terrifying. It says a tanker-truck worth of flammable hydrocarbons spewed out of a vat in less than two minutes. It vaporized and spread over the property before being ignited and bang. “High overpressures from the resulting vapor cloud explosion totally destroyed 13 trailers and damaged 27 others. People inside trailers were injured as far as 479 feet away from the blowdown drum, and trailers nearly 1000 feet away sustained damage.”
It wasn’t surprising that fuels can burn and even explode. Or that refineries might suffer from design flaws. The two surprises were how open the investigators were about negligence by the oil company and in recommending federal regulation as a cure.
For BP’s part, here was a particularly damning section:
the refinery only investigated three of the eight known previous ISOM blowdown release incidents, where flammable and potentially explosive vapor was released from the same blowdown drum involved in the March 23 accident. In 2004, an internal BP audit graded the refinery’s analysis of incident information as “poor.”
And there was that subhead, “Dysfunctional Safety Culture Existed at All Levels of BP,” followed by lines like “BP executives made spending cuts without assessing the safety impact of those decisions.”
I know I’m not including BP’s side of the story here, because my point isn’t to provide a news story. I’m just pleased that any U.S. federal agency would speak such clear truth to power. And even more surprised that they would call on the government, rather than voluntary industry action, as the remedy. They did so in a section called “OSHA Should Increase Petrochemical Inspections, Enforcement.”
Proposed OSHA fines during the twenty years preceding the March 2005 disaster - a period when ten fatalities occurred at the refinery - totaled $270,255; net fines collected after negotiations totaled $77,860….Federal OSHA conducted only nine [in depth, multi-week] inspections [between 1995 and 2005], and none in the refining sector. State agencies in the 26 states that operate their own workplace safety programs conducted a total of 48 [such] inspections, including six at refineries. However, a number of states - including Texas, Louisiana, and New Jersey, where much of the U.S. oil and chemical industry is concentrated - rely upon federal OSHA to enforce workplace safety rules….
California’s Contra Costa County, which has its own industrial safety ordinance, inspects each covered facility every three years. A county staff of five engineers performs an average of 16 inspections per year.
I can think of a few other places where the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board’s straightforward analysis could come in handy.
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this will sound anti-government but i don’t mean it that way. calling for greater oversight in a regulatory environment that is highly unlikely to provide that greater oversight could also be a way to avoid confronting the company directly?
They confront the company too. I was just pleased to see that they seem to understand the IDEA of government, which is more than you can say for most functionaries these days.
Does it seem likely to you that the great mass of federal employees don’t understand that idea? More that their itinerant bosses do not, I would think.
what idea? “gettin’ paid”?
Plenty of bureaucrats understand the point of government. But their words are rarely broadcast beyond the fabric walls of their beige cubicles.
government people are in a sector for the long term. that seems to make them non grata in modern appearance-based business. since everybody’s first concern is maintaining short-term value.