17 Die, 5 Hurt in Blast at Texas Chemical Plant : Disaster: Ball of fire shoots 200 feet into the night sky. The explosion is yet another in a rash of deadly accidents in the Houston Ship Channel.

The explosion boomed through the Atlantic Richfield chemical plant like a thunderclap, then a ball of fire shot 200 feet into the night sky, illuminating the Houston Ship Channel.

By the time the fire had been contained in the early hours of Friday morning, 17 people were dead and five were injured. A storage tank had been flattened like a soft drink can crushed in a vise. Workers began removing bodies from the wreckage shortly before noon Friday, but in some places the heated metal kept them at bay.

“This is a tragic accident,” said G. Johnson Jr., president of Arco Chemical Americas. “In my 32 years with Arco, I can’t remember another accident of this dimension. At this time, we are grieving the loss of our employees.”

The scene at the site of the explosion--the cause of which was still undetermined by late Friday--had a grimly familiar look.

Last October, the Phillips Petroleum Corp. refinery was rocked by a series of explosions, killing 23 workers and injuring more than 130.

Tuesday, another explosion injured five people at the Crown Central Petroleum Corp. on the channel.

On June 8, two people were injured at the Solvents and Chemicals Inc. plant, again on the ship channel. The blasts sent 55-gallon drums of chemicals flying high into the air, and more than 1,500 people had to be evacuated from the area.

These are only the major incidents. They do not include the more minor accidents that are considered a part of doing business along this hazardous strip of real estate.

Here on the Houston Ship Channel, where the largest complex of petrochemical plants in the nation lines both banks, a rash of deadly accidents has brought the unsightly underbelly of Texas’ largest city into focus. The picture is not a pleasant one.

The ship channel is home to 150 industries along what is called the “Fabulous 50 Miles” stretching from Galveston Bay to the eastern edge of Houston. The channel may well be the ugliest stretch of real estate in the nation, with its refineries and docks and smoke and fire belching from stacks along the muddy waterway. And, in the last year, the ship channel has also lived up to its reputation as a place with the potential to blow at any time.

The Phillips and Arco explosions have clearly shaken the people who live and work along the channel. And the two explosions, along with a number of other recent petrochemical accidents around the country, have given union leaders fodder for their claims that the industry’s use of unskilled contract labor for on-site jobs makes the plants more dangerous places.

“Here in Channelview is a place where accidents are waiting to happen,” said Pat Pinkerton, president of a group called the North Channel Concerned Citizens Against Pollution.

And Tony Mazzocchi, the secretary-treasurer of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, called it “another deplorable episode that was preventable.”

“It’s time to act before one of these communities goes up in smoke,” he said.

Of the 17 people killed at the Arco explosion, 11 were contract workers for a company called Austin Industrial, which was performing routine maintenance at the plant. The explosion occurred near two waste tanks in a unit that carries water into the plant and transforms it into steam to run several catalytic units.

Authorities said the explosion may have been set off when someone tried to start a nearby compressor, which may have created a spark.

Thomas Manning, a vice president of the oil consultant firm Purvin & Gertz Inc., said that is one of the most common ways for refinery accidents to occur.

“Quite often these things happen when maintenance work is going on,” he said. “You get an external spark that is not in the normal course of business.”

Manning said also that, at its best, the petrochemical industry is dangerous and that the refineries along the channel are now running at near capacity because of increased demand in recent years.

“Inevitably, something is going to catch fire,” he said. “It’s obviously a dangerous business, just like a munitions factory or a fireworks factory . . . .”

But what Houston has is 50 miles of this industry, without which the city would have little in the way of an economic base. In fact, Houston would probably be a sleepy farm community were it not for the ship channel.

In its early days, the waterway beside Houston was a sluggish bayou, but the community was advertised as having a “port” by the two brothers who founded it in the 1830s. It took the first boat three days to make it upstream from Galveston.

But, over the years, the channel was widened and deepened as the ships coming up it became ever larger. Now, Houston, although an inland city, has the third-largest port in the United States. But there was a price to be paid. At one point some years back, a Ralph Nader task force described it as the “nation’s most poisoned and potentially explosive body of water.”

Although the water has been cleaned up so that it can no longer be accused of that, the petrochemical plants have multiplied. And, with that expansion, it has become increasingly difficult to keep track of safety precautions being taken.

After the Phillips explosion last year, a representative of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration testified at a House subcommittee hearing that no “wall-to-wall” inspection of that facility had taken place in 16 years. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) is the chairman of the subcommittee.

Lisa Phillips, a subcommittee staff member, said also that the petrochemical industry had no process standard, a term to denote the guidelines, for example, for mixing chemicals.

“We are behind India in process standards,” she said.

Phillips said also that another finding by the committee is that roughly half of the workers in the petrochemical industry are non-union contractors and that there are very few government rules about how the petrochemical industry should operate.

“We have very few tools to make it better,” she said. The petrochemical industry has long contended that it has a very good safety and self-policing record and that no changes are needed. An OSHA spokesman said that was true but that, when an accident does happen, “it tends to be very major.”

Also, a preliminary report on a study contracted by OSHA shows that there are problems in the industry, particularly with contract workers.

The report, prepared by the John Gray Institute of Lamar University in Beaumont, Tex., said that short-term contractors were under economic pressure to perform jobs quickly and that “safety was frequently cited as a secondary consideration among short-term contractors.”

Further, the report said that contract workers receive less safety and health training and are less knowledgeable about workplace hazards.