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By David Michaels
The Chemical Safety Board isn’t pulling its punches. Its report on the March 2005 BP refinery explosion which killed 15 workers is scathing in its criticism of BP, concluding that “organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation” caused the explosion.
More surprisingly, CSB also went after OSHA for falling down on the job. OSHA, according to the CSB didn’t have enough trained inspectors, didn’t make enough inspections, and didn’t bother enforcing the Process Safety Management (PSM) standard aimed at preventing explosions of this sort:
only 0.2% of the approximately 2,816 facilities in targeted, high-hazard industries received a planned OSHA process safety inspection each year. That’s about one planned inspection per 500 facilities
By David Michaels
The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is holding a public meeting tonight in Texas City, Texas, to release the final report of its investigation into the explosion at the BP refinery that killed 15 workers and injured 170 more in March, 2005. Thursday, the House Education and Labor Committee will be holding a hearing on the disaster.
Both these events will focus on ways to prevent more explosions in the future. There are many lessons to be learned from the explosion, but its clear to me that the one lesson managers of other firms will take home from the BP disaster is that the subsequent law suits are what really hurt the company’s bottom line.
What’s to stop this from occurring again, elsewhere? Not OSHA, that’s for sure. More than anything else, fear of lawsuits has replaced formal regulation as the best means to encourage good corporate behavior.
