The Galveston County Daily News

TEXAS CITY — Marking three years since the deadly explosions at BP America’s Texas City refinery, a federal agency has released its most comprehensive video about the disaster in hopes of preventing other accidents around the world.

The 56-minute video, “Anatomy of a Disaster,” re-creates the events of March 23, 2005, with animation and interviews with independent analysts and investigators, showing in detail how a slew of human errors and a corporate culture that valued production over safety led to the deaths of 15 people and injuries to more than 170.

The video, produced by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, includes a new nine-minute computer animation of the events that led to the explosions, dissecting how any one of several safety steps, had they been taken, may have averted disaster.

The explosions happened at the plant’s isomerization unit, which boosts octane levels in gasoline.

A tower used to distill flammable liquid hydrocarbons was filled more than 15 times higher than the standard 6-foot level.

Employees had received conflicting instructions. Communication from the night shift to the day shift was poor.

A day supervisor left a control room to attend to a family emergency, leaving one worker to supervise three refinery units without a qualified supervisor, a violation of company policy.

The one worker who was left was fatigued, on his 30th consecutive day of 12-hour shifts.

A gauge and an alarm failed to work. An investigation would show that refinery workers filled out forms showing maintenance had been completed on the alarm when it actually hadn’t.

And despite recommendations and reports throughout several years showing that the refinery should replace a 1950s-era safety structure, called a blowdown drum, with a more modern flare device that burns off dangerous gases, the blowdown drum was still in place.

When the tower overfilled with the liquid, safety valves vented it to the blowdown drum, a device intended to relieve pressure on the system by releasing vapors into the air — without burning them off.

But in this case, it was a geyser of flammable liquid — the equivalent of a tanker truck full of hot gasoline — that shot out of the stack, landed on the ground and created a huge cloud of vapor.

Within 90 seconds, the cloud engulfed the entire refinery unit and surrounding trailers.

Just outside the unit, two workers sat in a pickup that was idling. The pickup’s air intake sucked up the flammable vapors. As the truck’s engine began to race, the workers couldn’t shut it off. They fled.

The engine backfired, igniting the vapor cloud.

The resulting explosions demolished the trailers, where the 15 fatalities happened.

Workers there had not been warned that a potentially dangerous startup procedure was under way.

Analysts said BP had a culture that rewarded employees for high production and low rates of personal injury, but virtually ignored safety in refinery processes.

Andrew Hopkins, a professor and safety expert at Australian National University, said such an attitude is akin to an airline trying to convince customers its airplanes won’t crash because airline employees have a low rate of slips, trips and falls.

The Texas City refinery had a history of gas releases, fires and other releases in the years leading up to 2005, and analysts in the video said such near-misses should have been investigated as if they weren’t misses.

“It’s only a matter of luck whether something (released) catches fire or not,” said Texas A&M University professor Trevor Kletz.

Since the board’s investigation, the petrochemical industry and government agencies have adopted new process safety guidelines that require new equipment standards and minimum distances for trailers placed in refineries.

BP has spent billions of dollars upgrading its U.S. refineries, settling lawsuits and trying to restore its reputation.

Victims and their families are still trying to get a federal court to assess criminal penalties against BP that go beyond the $50 million fine outlined in a plea agreement.

And investigators have probed three more accidental fatalities at the refinery, about one per year.

“My fear is that some of the other refineries in the United States will feel that it couldn’t happen to me,” said Glenn Erwin, a United Steelworkers safety official who had a friend who died in the 2005 disaster. “The ones that feel that couldn’t happen at their site is the ones that are set up to happen there.”

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On The Web

See the video or request a free copy at www.csb.gov.