Burned Worker Describes Oil Blast : Testifies at Trial of Firms Charged With Safety Violations

A 40-year-old maintenance worker who suffered second- and third-degree burns over more than 70% of his body when he opened the wrong valve at a Wilmington oil refinery took the witness stand Wednesday in a criminal case against his former employers.

Florenzio Perez, testifying before a Los Angeles Municipal Court jury, emotionally recounted the explosion and fire that resulted when oil, heated to 950 degrees, shot out of a valve at the Champlin Petroleum Co. refinery.

“There was just a big boom,” said the disabled Lakewood resident, dabbing tears from his eyes. “I tried, I tried to tighten it back up, you know. . . . I guess it was too hot.

“I tried to start running, I tried to run every which way I can, but everywhere I turned there was fire.”

Safety Orders

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has charged Champlin, a unit of Union Pacific Corp., and six other defendants with nine counts violating state safety orders as a result of two accidents that occurred at the facility during the summer of 1983. The other defendants include Plant Operations Inc., which operated the refinery’s coking units, and American Plant Services Inc., which employed Perez and other maintenance workers there.

If convicted, the defendants, including individual officials of the firms, face maximum fines of $20,000. The officials also face maximum one-year jail sentences, prosecutors said.

The Perez accident occurred, Deputy Dist. Atty. Fred Macksoud charges, because valves and drums in the plant’s coking units were not properly labeled. Defense attorneys have countered that Perez, who had worked at the plant for less than two months, was an overeager new employee who was not authorized to open the drain valves.

“This prosecution is improperly based and may be an exercise in politics but not in criminal law,” argued attorney Charles Theodore Mathews, representing Plant Operations, in his opening statement.

‘Still a Mess’

However, Jan Chatten-Brown, the district attorney’s special assistant for occupational safety matters, speaking outside the courtroom, said the refinery’s approach to safety “is primitive” and that “the place is still a mess.”

She added that the trial, which began in early July, should also serve to focus on lingering safety problems at several local oil refineries. Since the Perez accident, she noted, three deaths have occurred at other refineries in the county.

Perez, who authorities said has undergone about 20 operations to help reconstruct portions of his face, testified that he was working on a coking unit with two higher-ranking employees, when one of them suggested it was time to drain a valve. Perez volunteered to do it on his own--a task that he had never before performed alone. None of the valves, he said, was labeled.

“I was thinking, ‘Don’t mess up. This is your first time. Don’t mess up. Do the job right,’ ” he recalled.

Check Valves

During cross-examination, he acknowledged that he had been warned previously to check whether the valves appeared hot before he opened them. However, he did not do so, he said.

In the other incident, less than a month later, employee Robbie Matthews suffered several broken bones when four tons of coke knocked him off a crusher car. Prosecutors contend that the defendants ignored safety orders requiring guardrails in the area.