Are Refineries Unsafe? : Petroleum: A recent series of fatal fires and explosions at oil and petrochemical plants has raised questions about the industry’s safety practices and use of contract workers.
George Short wanted to pursue his photography hobby, so a few months ago he quit his union job of 19 years as a pipe fitter at the Chevron Corp. oil refinery in El Segundo.
To make ends meet, he signed up for part-time work with the maintenance contracting firm of Irwin Industries Inc. in Long Beach, becoming one of thousands of contract workers who are called in by refineries to supplement the full-time work force.
As a seasoned pipe fitter, Short, 47, was unusual among contract workers: He had far more experience and training than most of his colleagues, he recalled.
But his experience didn’t help him on Jan. 19. That day, he was part of an Irwin crew called in to remove a one-inch pipe under contract to the Powerine Oil Co. refinery in Santa Fe Springs.
While removing some clogged matter from a valve, he was suddenly sprayed with a violent stream of naphtha, a highly volatile liquid refined from crude oil. The vapors ignited, and Short found himself on fire.
“I was screaming at the top of my lungs, and they came over and tried to beat me out,” he recalled recently. “They said I wouldn’t make it.”
Short, who suffered second- and third-degree burns over half of his body, is now recovering at home in La Mirada. Powerine was fined $975 for safety violations; the refiner has appealed and said it is investigating the fire’s cause. Irwin officials declined to comment on the fire.
The sad fact is that Short’s accident was hardly unusual. In the past few years, a series of fires and explosions have plagued the oil and petrochemical refining industry, culminating on Oct. 23 with the massive explosion at Phillips Petroleum Co.’s Houston Chemical Complex that killed 23.
The accidents have called into question common industry practices, particularly the use of so-called contract workers, or subcontracted employees, who, labor officials charge, have less experience, training and safety preparation than permanent refinery employees. Several of the more spectacular accidents--including the Phillips disaster--have involved contract workers.
But as Short’s experience illustrates, not all accidents involving contract workers can be traced to simple causes or blamed on inexperience or poor training. Moreover, permanent refinery workers have been involved in their share of fires, as well.
Some industry critics blame the accidents on much more fundamental problems in the nation’s refining system: lapses in management, staff reductions and overworked crews, high production rates, inadequate or delayed maintenance and lax enforcement of health and safety laws.
For its part, the industry strongly denies that there is a safety problem--or even that the pace of accidents has increased. “We disagree with the contention that safety has diminished,” said the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s main trade association, in a statement.
Data Scarce
Until now, there has been precious little hard data to support either side of the argument. There is no single repository of statistics on refinery accidents, and officials of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration admit that the agency’s own data may undercount injuries from such accidents.
But perhaps as early as this week, the first of a number of serious studies may provide some clues to the extent and root causes of the accidents, as well as intensify the debate over their prevention.
The first comprehensive data on the use of contract workers will appear in the initial version of a report to be presented by Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole to President Bush. The data will accompany a report on the Phillips accident that is expected to include recommendations for OSHA citations and fines against Phillips.
Also this week, a select committee of the California Assembly could begin mailing questionnaires for its own survey of the state’s 31 refineries to assess hazard levels.
“I’m looking forward to really getting some hard data and coming forward with a series of recommendations. And, frankly, I think the oil industry is anxious to improve its record,” said Assemblyman Dave Elder (D-San Pedro), who chairs the select committee.
Even the API is considering cleaning up its statistical record-keeping by making accident reporting mandatory for its members. Its previous system was voluntary, and an API spokesman concedes that the system was “not very useful.”
The report to Bush, being prepared under a $448,636 grant to the John Gray Institute of the Lamar University System in Texas, under the auspices of OSHA, will take a hard look at the burgeoning use of contract workers in refineries.
Contract Workers
Oil company officials regularly use contract workers to perform routine maintenance and repairs and to augment regular staffs during major construction projects or so-called turnarounds, during which entire units in a refinery may be shut down for overhaul. Contract workers may also be called in to perform specialized work not normally handled by regular refinery employees. The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union--which has seen its membership decline in recent years--is the main group questioning the use of such workers. The union argues that refiners have been relying more on largely non-union contract workers as a cost-cutting measure. The union estimates that contract employees account for about 23% of 43,000 regular refinery workers nationally.
“I think when all the facts are in, . . . we will see, No. 1, that there has been a tremendous trend toward the utilization of contract workers; two, that the trend is to substitute (for) permanent workers with cheaper, less expensive contract workers, and three, as a result of this trend, plants are not as safe as they once were,” said Robert E. Wages, vice president of the union.
Refinery officials dispute that, however. Some admit using more contract workers in the past few years, but others say they have not. In any case, refiners and contractors argue that the training and safety preparation given to contract workers is every bit as good as that given to permanent refinery employees. They charge the union with scapegoating contract workers in a campaign to further its own agenda and argue that contracting work is a necessary part of refinery operations.
“Many times, oil companies will contract out to our members projects that they do not want to do internally, and we will very often get the hardest jobs, the least safe jobs and the most technically difficult jobs,” said Dan Bennet, executive vice president of Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group in Washington that represents some of the companies that supply contract workers. “You must factor all that in.”
But that hasn’t stopped some full-time union workers in a number of California refineries from complaining about contract workers. Contract workers are sometimes unfamiliar with rudimentary tools and parts, disregard safety procedures or are unable to speak English, they charge.
Mobil Refinery
Danny Snyder has worked for nine years at the Mobil Oil Corp. refinery in Torrance, where two fires in the summer of 1988 were linked to contract workers.
“When I first hired in at Mobil Oil, all you’d see was white helmets,” indicating Mobil employees, he said. “Now, all you see is orange helmets,” indicating contract employees. “About 15% of them are qualified workers I know. The rest I don’t know--and I don’t trust ‘em,” he said.
Snyder recalls examining a gasoline pipe connection that recently had been repaired by contract workers. “I found they had put 14 paper gaskets (in a space) that only required one. . . . I had to go in and change it out. . . . (Otherwise,) it could have blown out,” he said.
Mobil refinery manager Wyman Robb said 180 to 200 contract workers supplement the regular work force of about 860 on any given day, but he denied that contract workers are unqualified, do shoddy work or pose a safety hazard.
After the two fires in 1988, the refinery instituted rigorous new standards for qualifying contractors, required contract workers to wear new protective clothing and stepped up monitoring of contract work, he said.
He declined to discuss what role contract workers played in the disastrous fire at the refinery in November, 1987, which injured 10 and caused $17 million in damage. Internal documents have suggested that human error was a factor.
At Tosco Corp.’s Avon refinery in Northern California, a confidential memo detailing the results of an internal maintenance and construction department critique meeting found numerous shortcomings in one contract crew that worked on a turnaround project in 1987:
* Contract workers were unable to speak or read English, causing communication problems and requiring an interpreter.
* Drug abuse was suspected.
* Contract personnel were known to work more than 24 hours at a stretch.
* There was “abuse” of protective clothing and equipment, and contract workers had to be constantly reminded to wear safety glasses.
Tosco spokesman James Simmons played down the findings in a recent interview. The non-English speakers were craftsmen, not supervisors, and the contractor had enough bilingual supervisors to deal with the workers, he said. The drug abuse suspicion came down to the testimony of one worker who thought that he smelled marijuana smoke; none was found. Only one contract welder worked a long shift, and the contractor was told that such practices were unacceptable.
As for the protective clothing, he said it is not unusual for the company to have to remind contract workers to wear protective clothing. Simmons added that the job was completed on time and under budget, and that the contractor--a small independent company--remains on Tosco’s bid list for future jobs.
Richmond Plant
Union official Wages points to Chevron Corp.’s plant in Richmond, Calif., where more than 70 fires have been reported in just one unit of that refinery in the past five years, some linked to contract workers. A fire in April, 1989, severely burned three workers and resulted in more than 100 OSHA citations and fines totaling $877,000; the company is contesting the charges.
Paul R. Larson, vice president of manufacturing for Chevron’s domestic unit, said the 70 Richmond fires included everything from a full-fledged blaze to a piece of smoldering insulation; a spokesman in the Richmond refinery said that only three of the fires resulted in injuries. Larson denied that the statistic indicated a safety problem.
Though he was unable to say whether the safety training of contract workers is as extensive as that given Chevron employees, he added that all contractors must show evidence of good safety records before they are allowed to bid on jobs in refineries. He added that Chevron monitors all work done by contractors for safety and quality and denied that they are unsafe.
The issue of contract workers came to a head in the investigation of the Phillips disaster. Besides the 23 killed, more than 100 were injured in an explosion so intense “that the steel beams appeared to be a bird’s nest of pretzeled metal,” said OSHA chief Gerard F. Scannell in testimony before Congress last year.
Last November, in response to a House subcommittee investigating the Phillips disaster, Phillips officials admitted that contract workers do not routinely receive the same safety manuals, materials or training as Phillips employees. But, they added, the materials and training that the contract workers do receive “are more than adequate” for the work for which such employees are hired.
In testimony to the subcommittee chaired by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), Phillips President and Chief Operating Officer Glenn A. Cox also admitted that turnover was higher for contract employees than for Phillips employees, adding that “many of the jobs performed by those contractors are the very beginning skills or very labor-intensive type jobs.”
Operating Rates
Not everyone blames contract workers for accidents. Some critics argue that the refining industry’s high operating rates--80% to 90% to meet high demand for gasoline and other products--may be compelling refiners to delay routine maintenance. Industry officials heatedly deny that, noting that the cost of a significant accident is far greater than the cost of taking a unit out of production to make repairs.
In May, 1988, at Amoco Corp.’s Yorktown, Va., refinery, employee George Brannigan died from burns received when a spark from a nearby compressor ignited a flood of naphtha that he was hosing off a concrete deck into a nearby drain.
Just a couple of months before, Brannigan had been part of a crew that had complained that the process of draining naphtha posed a safety hazard, and Brannigan himself had sketched a way to enclose the drain apparatus, according to a report by the Commonwealth of Virginia.
But a supervisor decided that the hazard was not significant and put off changes in the drain system until the refinery’s next turnaround--a year later. Virginia cited Amoco and fined the company $700.
Enforcement Problems
Richard Evans, Amoco’s vice president for refining and engineering, argued in an interview last week that Brannigan’s proposal was not related to the accident’s cause and would not have prevented it.
Critics also blame accidents on weak enforcement of health and safety laws.
Before the Phillips explosion, OSHA had not conducted a comprehensive inspection of the plant since 1975, though it had conducted nine partial inspections since 1972, the most recent after a fire in August that injured four workers, including one who later died of a heart attack.
The coming week’s reports will be further steps in revising OSHA’s refining industry policies, said Alan C. McMillan, deputy assistant secretary of labor for OSHA in Washington.
“We have to decide where to put our enforcement resources, and we have to do that in part based on empirical data,” he said. “Maybe what we’ll see is that we haven’t looked completely accurately” at the refining industry, he added.
He admitted that current policies make it possible to miss accidents. “If there’s an explosion or a small fire where there are no deaths or injuries, . . . from OSHA’s perspective, we might never know about it,” he said. “We’re concerned . . . about what we would call near misses.”
