BP Explosion:
Lessons in Accountability
This article was first published by InTech Magazine
in their June 2005 issue.
By Tara Hart
In the aftermath of
the 23 March blast in BP Amoco’s isomerization unit
in Texas City, Texas, questions quickly arose about
blame and excuses you might anticipate after such a
disaster.
Is this just the
nature of the beast in the oil & gas industry?
Aren’t high pressures and high temperatures
inherently dangerous with fatalities to be expected?
Are contractors the problem? If union workers were on
site, would this have happened? And then there’s
plaintiff attorneys parrying with BP
representatives--Fingers pointing in both directions,
both sides mounting the battle cry, “It’s not me,
it’s you!” And
finally, the community and industry question, “How
do we make sure it doesn’t happen again?”
Nature of the beast
Getting killed
because you went to work is not acceptable. In fact,
the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA)
agrees. Employers
are required to furnish employees a place to work
without “recognized hazards” causing or “likely to cause death or serious physical
harm.”
This OSHA
requirement, known as the general duty clause, only
applies to exposing employers, or those who had
employees exposed to hazards. BP and the contractors
involved were all exposing employers. BP and the
contractors have a legal duty to keep their workers
alive, returning them at day’s end the same way they
received them at day’s beginning.
High temperatures, pressures
Is it the processes
themselves? This suggests we should expect fatalities
in bathtubs and automobiles. After all, many household
injuries and fatalities occur in the bathroom. And,
according to the World Health Organization auto
accidents take over one million lives each year. Is
the bathtub and the car the problem? Or is it operator
and user errors? I don’t know any bathtub that
actually drowned a person, or a car that just, out of
nowhere and all by itself, ran a red light. People
direct hazardous environments and run dangerous
machinery. It’s the decisions people make that
determine the outcome.
Contractor
infrastructure is inherent in the oil and gas industry
and is an economically beneficial practice to owners
and contractors. For reasons we still don’t know,
work scheduling the day of the explosion allowed
incompatible work operations to occur concurrently in
the start up area. This is not a problem of worker
status or contractor vs. union worker; it is one of
management decisions for both owners and contractors
alike. In the case of this particular explosion, the
contractor who ignited the spark was less a cause than
an effect of process failure because no unqualified
worker, contractor or anyone else, should have been in
the vicinity of the start up on a turnaround
maintenance operation.
Who’s to blame?
One month after the
explosion, BP attorneys filed an answer to
plaintiffs’ suits alleging “the sole cause” of
the explosion to be negligence; and the sole
perpetrator of this negligence to be unnamed third
parties. In BP’s defense, this is a general denial;
standard operating procedure in legal cases of this
nature; and BP’s own investigative team concurrently
admits they are still pursuing the multiplicity of
factors that led to the event.
There is never a
sole cause to a catastrophe of this size. An explosion
of this type is typically the result of a series of
bad management decisions. OSHA statistics indicate
with every 300 recordable injuries there are 30
disabling injuries and one fatality. Herman Williams,
a safety professional in the oil and gas industry with
dual obligations in safety and operations for the
first 17 years of his career says, “my experience
demonstrates that, with OSHA stats as the baseline,
there will be about 3,000 non-injury accidents
preceding the 300 recordable incidents and, therefore,
30,000 unsafe acts preceding every worker fatality.”
One person could
have made the right decision to derail this explosion.
It was preventable and those capable of derailing it
are knowable, but not yet known. It is
premature to assign or deny blame. However,
Terry Bryant, plaintiff’s counsel in the event,
says, “If BP were as concerned with safety before
the explosion as they are with secrecy after the
explosion, this tragedy may never have occurred.”
Yet, for Ed Dhayer, a safety professional and over
30-year veteran of the oil and gas industry, who’s
brother-in-law, Morris King, died in the explosion,
accountability is very simple. “When you invite
someone into your home, you have a responsibility to
keep them safe and have them leave the way they
arrived-in tact.”
The BP Amoco
Explosion---a catalyst for change, or another fading
headline? You
decide.
Behind
the Byline
Tara Hart is the
chief executive of The Compliance Alliance, an
internationally recognized safety firm, and the author
of the upcoming book Faking Safety, which
examines how America’s legal, regulatory and
financial infrastructure is making safety unsafe.
You may reach Tara at www.AskTara.com
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