Weld Tests at Shell Refinery Were Falsified, Company Says

A subcontractor admitted Friday that an inexperienced employee falsified the results of hardness tests on more than 20 welds on a unit slated to carry volatile liquids at the Shell Oil Co. refinery in Carson. The welds are under investigation by the state as possibly faulty.

Cooperheat Inc. of Somerset, N.J., the subcontractor doing work for Shell, also admitted that the employee was left alone to conduct the tests even though a background check had not been completed on him, said Emmett J. Lescroart, Cooperheat’s chief executive. The employee had been on the job only a couple of weeks.

The employee was subsequently fired when the background check turned up questionable information, Lescroart said without going into detail. Cooperheat has since changed its policies to avoid a repeat of the problem, Lescroart said.

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health began its probe when the same disgruntled employee blew the whistle on the false testing, Lescroart said. The employee was not identified.

The admission comes at a time when union officials and other critics are questioning the safety of bringing contract workers into refineries to conduct routine maintenance work. On Thursday, the Department of Labor promised new safety guidelines for refineries in the wake of the explosion at the Phillips Petroleum Co. chemical plant in Texas last fall.

Union officials have said that Cal/OSHA investigators tested more than 25 of the welds in the Shell refinery and found them to be faulty. Cal/OSHA officials have declined to discuss the results of their investigation. The welds were made during a routine overhaul of the refinery’s coking unit.

The falsifications occurred when the new employee was left alone to conduct hardness tests on welds that Cooperheat had “stress relieved,” a heating process that reduces a weld’s brittleness and internal stresses.

When a test showed a result at variance with a desired reading, the employee wrote down the desired reading instead of the actual reading, Lescroart said, adding that “he didn’t grasp the process.”

Because of the falsified test results, the welds in question were actually more brittle than they were supposed to be. Lescroart denied that the welds were “faulty,” but admitted that they would have had less flexibility in the event of an unusual surge of pressure. Had the employee reported test results correctly, the welds could have been treated again.

If Cal/OSHA had not stepped in, Shell’s own spot checking would have turned up the problem, Lescroart said. “Under no circumstances would these pipes have been placed in service without a final verification that all post-weld heat treatments had achieved the specified results,” he said in a statement.

Shell spokesman Mark Singer said Shell’s internal testing procedures turned up a problem with Cooperheat’s test results, though he said there was never a question about the welds’ integrity.

A second contractor, Brown & Root, which actually made the welds, reaffirmed that its own X-rays showed the welds to be good.

Aside from the welds in question, Cal/OSHA has “gone over close to 1,000 other welds in the Shell refinery, and they’ve found them all to be OK,” said Michael Urban, Cooperheat’s Western division vice president. “This is being viewed as an isolated instance.”

Lescroart said the investigation did not signal a wider problem with other welds treated or tested by Cooperheat in other Southern California refineries. As part of its investigation, Cal/OSHA requested records of work Cooperheat has performed at other area refineries, but the investigation has not expanded to include other refineries.

As a result of the investigation, Cooperheat employees no longer will allowed to work until background checks are completed, Urban said.

And new employees will not be left alone to conduct hardness tests, which will be left to more experienced technicians, he said.