Southland Firms Mourn Loss of Workers in Refinery Blast

The refinery explosion that shook a town southeast of Houston on Wednesday also sent a shock wave through the headquarters of Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. in Pasadena.

Eleven of the 15 workers who died in the explosion and fire at the BP refinery in Texas City worked for Jacobs, one of the world’s largest construction and engineering firms.

“It’s my worst nightmare,” Jacobs Chief Executive Noel Watson said in an interview outside his office Thursday. “We work in these refineries a lot, and we’ve never had anything approaching this. I’m devastated.”

Fluor Corp., another big Southern California-based engineering firm, also was stung by the blast. Three employees who were working at the refinery were killed in the explosion.

Although all the names of the dead hadn’t been released late Thursday, Watson said that to his knowledge, the Jacobs employees who were killed were based in Texas. Fluor spokesman Jerry Holloway said two of the victims lived in Texas and the other lived in Louisiana.

Jacobs executives said they were still trying to get a handle on what happened.

The employees killed in the accident, most of them affiliated with Jacobs’ JE Merit Constructors subsidiary, were attending a meeting in an office trailer about 150 yards away from the unit where the explosion occurred, Watson said. About 375 Jacobs employees were overhauling a separate unit at the refinery that had been shut down for maintenance.

The Fluor workers also were in a meeting close to the blast site, Holloway said. He couldn’t confirm whether they were in the same meeting with the Jacobs workers. The Aliso Viejo company is offering grief counseling to the victims’ families.

Watson said his first concern was reaching out to and “doing all that we can to support” the families of the employees who were killed.

Jacobs, which had $4.6 billion in revenue last year, is well known for building and operating large infrastructure projects, including refineries, manufacturing facilities and paper and pulp plants. It has had a close relationship with federal agencies, providing consulting services on defense and aerospace projects.

With 70 offices worldwide, including in Europe, Asia and Australia, Jacobs employs about 35,000 people. The company was founded by Brooklyn, N.Y., native Joseph Jacobs in 1947 as a chemical engineering consulting firm in California. It grew in the 1970s after it went public. The company now builds and maintains plants in the oil, chemical and biotechnology fields. Jacobs died in October in Pasadena at age 88.

The company has been rapidly expanding for more than a decade, in part by acquiring foreign firms. In the last year, it bought Scottish consulting firm Babtie, which specializes in transportation and utility infrastructure.

Sales have grown by more than 30% since 2000 but slipped slightly last year, when profit was flat, in part because of a canceled project and delays in some government contracts. Jacobs’ stock, up 24% over the last year, fell $1.47 to $53.57 on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

Last year, a Jacobs subsidiary became entangled in a probe into alleged bid rigging connected with an expansion project at Chicago’s lakefront convention center. Two former Jacobs executives pleaded guilty last year to making false statements to investigators.

The company said at the time that it cooperated with authorities.