BP Texas City explosion may lead to major changes in process safety

The disaster has spurred a reappraisal of process safety practices and the federal resources allocated to oversight

Joe Kamalick/ Washington DC

IT WAS the worst US industrial catastrophe in 15 years. At 1:20 p.m. on March 23, 2005, an explosion ripped through BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, laying waste to an aging isomerization unit, killing 15 workers, injuring 180 others and triggering an investigation that may lead to profound changes in US process safety control.

The accident has driven a new alliance between process industry trade groups and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is now at work designing new standards and measures for process production safety.

It has also moved US Senator Frank Lautenberg (Democrat-New Jersey) and others to call for greatly increased federal regulatory and oversight control of the process industry in hopes of forestalling similar such tragedies.

A FATAL FLAW

Until early last month, Carolyn Merritt chaired the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), the federal agency chartered by Congress to find the causes of major chemical industry accidents and communicate lessons learned to the industry.

She says the Texas City tragedy revealed a basic flaw in BP’s safety culture that she fears may be widespread in the US process industry: the company’s focus on personal injuries as a measure of safety conditions at Texas City gave a misleading indication of process safety performance.

The CSB investigation found that “while most attention was focused on the injury rate, the overall safety culture and process safety management program had serious deficiencies.”

The report on BP Texas City faulted BP for “organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP corporation,” she observes. It also found that although “warning signs of possible disaster were present for several years company officials did not intervene effectively to prevent it.”

The report states: “Despite numerous previous fatalities at the Texas City refinery (23 deaths in the 30 years prior to the 2005 disaster) and many hazardous material releases, BP did not take effective steps to stem the growing risk of a catastrophic event.”

That same myopic focus on personnel safety as opposed to process safety controls likely exists, although perhaps to a lesser extent, at other US refineries and chemical plants, Merritt suggests. “To different degrees, many other companies have similar shortcomings,” she says.

Scott Berger, director of the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) in New York City, agrees with Merritt. He says that plant operators too often become complacent when personnel safety – the prevention of personal injuries such as falls, cuts and chemical exposures – is the focus.

“Process safety incidents happen much less frequently than [personnel] safety events,” Berger said, “so sometimes companies will make the mistake of thinking that since no process safety incidents have occurred recently, their program is working.”

“This may cause them to become complacent,” Berger says, “and a process safety incident then becomes more likely. One thing that the BP incident has done is cause companies to challenge complacency.”

To help ensure producers overcome that complacency, Merritt says a greater oversight authority and more manpower for OSHA and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are needed because those agencies have to find safety failures before they can cause accidents and fatalities. At the CSB, Merritt notes, “we only investigate facilities that have already blown up.”

THE REGULATORY RESPONSE

Senator Lautenberg is chairman of the Senate subcommittee responsible for the security of infrastructure, including chemical production and refining. At a hearing this year, he said the BP Texas City accident and subsequent investigations have uncovered major shortcomings in the way industry handles safety and how federal agencies supervise – or fail to supervise – process-sector health and safety concerns.

Among Lautenberg’s objectives is introducing legislation giving greater statutory authority and funding to the CSB.

Testifying before Congress, Merritt welcomed Lautenberg’s call for more funding and investigative authority for the agency, but she called for much broader government oversight and control of safety in the process industry. Although she mostly blamed BPfor the Texas City blast, she lashed out atOSHA and the EPA, saying both had failed their regulatory and enforcement obligations.

“Thorough implementation of existing OSHA and EPA process safety rules would prevent a number of tragic accidents, including the one in Texas City,” she told Lautenberg’s subcommittee. “Like other refineries, the Texas City facility was covered under both the OSHA process safety management (PSM) standard and the EPA risk management program (RMP) rule,” she said.

Both systems require documented operating procedures and worker training. They also need “facilities to follow certain good safety management practices – such as performing hazard analyses, management of change reviews, incident investigations and preventive maintenance,” she said.

“Our investigation found numerous requirements of the OSHA and EPA standards were not followed in Texas City,” she added. “For example, a relief-valve study that was required under the regulations was 12 years overdue on the day of the explosion.

“Incidents that should have served as serious warnings were not properly investigated nor were the underlying causes identified and corrected,” she said. “We found, however, that OSHA does few planned, comprehensive inspections of chemical plants and oil refineries to assure compliance with its own rules.”

From 1995 to 2005, OSHA conducted only nine comprehensive inspections, none of which included refineries, says Merritt.

Merritt did not spare the EPA, either. Although the BP refinery at Texas City was subject to “a full suite of process safety requirements under EPA’s independent regulatory authority EPA records we received show that the BP Texas City refinery never received an RMP audit prior to the accident.” She also said EPA process safety enforcement relies almost wholly on reviews of written company submissions rather than detailed field inspections.

Merritt urged Congress to boost funding for the EPA and OSHA so they can deploy more investigators. But she called for a new approach in federal regulation of process industry safety, suggesting refining and chemical facilities should first “receive permission to operate in advance, based on a demonstration of safety competence to government authorities.”

Merritt said the CSB needs more authority from Congress to secure primary access to accident sites, and ensure that evidence is not disturbed until the board’s own investigators can arrive. In some investigations, local police and fire department officials barred CSB agents from sites until municipal investigators had completed their work -work that sometimes destroyed evidence.

She also asked Lautenberg and the committee to give the CSB authority to decide where accident-site evidence is to be tested, noting that bickering between lawyers for those injured in accidents and those representing site operators over which labs are impartial, has delayed investigations.

Merritt also asked Congress for full authority to demand OSHA and the EPA enforcement records, and more statutory protection for witness identities and testimony given to CSB. She complained that in the BP Texas City investigation, both the EPA and OSHA resisted providing full data in response to repeated CSB requests.

GREATER POWERS FOR THE CSB

Lautenberg and Congress are likely to grant CSB the powers it seeks. OSHA and the EPA may get more funding and authority. It is unknown whether Congress will adopt Merritt’s call for a regulatory approach that would require on-site process safety inspections by government agents before a chemical plant could begin or resume production.

Lautenberg said that when Congress returns from its recess on September 4, “I will be drafting legislation to strengthen the CSB and improve its operating ability to investigate the root causes of accidents.”

Perhaps showing sympathy for Merritt’s “inspection before production” proposal, he said the EPA and OSHA “must work with the Chemical Safety Board and state and local officials to ensure facilities operate safely.”

RUINED LIVES

A 340-page report by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) provides an exhaustive dissection of the disaster at BP Texas City, but some of the most eloquent descriptions of its painful aftermath came in recent testimony before Congress.

According to the CSB’s investigation, the explosion occurred as the raffinate splitter tower in the isomerization unit was being restarted after a maintenance shutdown.

Contrary to start-up procedures, the operators pumped liquid hydrocarbons into the tower for more than three hours without removing any liquid.

And then, critical alarms and control instruments that should have warned them that the level of material in the tower had gone well above the allowed range ended up giving false indications.

Workers were oblivious to the developing problem as the 170-foot-tall tower filled to capacity and then overflowed into an overhead pipe that ran down the side of the tower to three pressure relief valves located about 20 feet above ground.

While the overhead pipe filled with the highly flammable liquid, pressures on the relief valves at the bottom rose rapidly from about 21 pounds per square inch (psi) to about 64 psi until they opened, venting into a blowdown drum, which had a vent stack open to the sky.

Nothing interfered with the gushing stream of hydrocarbons, which poured into the blowdown drum for six minutes, rising higher and higher up the 113-foot-tall stack until it finally shot out like a geyser.

Antiquated, unsafe design

“This blowdown system was an antiquated and unsafe design,” notes the CSB report. Originally installed in the 1950s, it “had never been connected to a flare system to safely contain liquids and combust flammable vapors released from the process.”

As the geyser of volatile hydrocarbons hit the air and fell back toward the ground, it vaporized and expanded into a large, explosive cloud. Soon this cloud found an ignition source, probably a backfire from an idling diesel pickup truck 25 feet from the blowdown drum.

The thunderous blast demolished two BP personnel work trailers only 121 feet away. All 15 workers killed were in the two trailers. All of them were contract workers.

None who died was involved in the restart, and none needed to be there, the CSB said.

The human cost

The CSB investigation reveals the how and why of the accident, but it pales next to the Congressional testimony last month of Linda Hunnings, the widow of Jim Hunnings, a quality control inspector who was among the 15 contractors killed.

“I lost not only my husband that day,” Linda Hunnings told Senator Lautenberg and the committee, “I lost my best friend, lover and the man with whom I wanted to grow old with.

“Not a day goes by that I do not think of him. I think I do not have any more tears to cry, but I look at his picture, hear one of ‘our’ songs and they start to flow. I miss him so much and I would give anything to have him back.

“Jim was a good husband, father and papaw. We have two children who miss their dad desperately. We have five grandchildren, two of whom will never know him except through pictures and what my children and I tell them about him.

“My days are long and lonely. My husband and I had just started enjoying ‘our time’ together -no kids, just the two of us,” she said.

“We did everything together. We loved to travel, especially wherever there was water. He loved to spend time with our children and our grandchildren. He loved to cook for me and was very romantic.

“We were married for 27 years and together for 30 years. He was taken from me much too soon.”

For more information on the CSB, visit its website at www.csb.gov