Safety Record of Oil and Gas Industry Is Weak, OSHA Says
Fort Worth Star-Telegram—June 11th, 2010
The oil and gas industry has a troubling record on worker safety, a congressional subcommittee was told Thursday.
That record includes a June 1999 gasoline pipeline explosion in Bellingham, Wash., that killed three people, including two 10-year-old boys who were playing in a creek; 15 who died and 170 who were injured at a BP oil refinery blast in Texas in 2005; and a fire at an Anacortes, Wash., refinery that killed seven workers, just weeks before an explosion and fire at the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and released a massive oil spill in April.
“To me this doesn’t seem simply like a string of bad luck; it appears to be a disregard for safety regulations and precautions across an entire industry,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the subcommittee’s chairman.
Murray was furious that BP turned down an invitation to testify before her Employment and Workplace Safety Subcommittee of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. She tangled with an industry representative who sought to sidestep criticism of BP’s worker safety record.
“Does the industry stand behind BP?” Murray asked Charles Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.
“Stand behind is a broad word, ma’am,” Drevna said.
“I would suggest the rest of the industry tell BP how it feels to be sitting there,” Murray said.
In the past four months, 58 workers have died in explosions, fires and collapses at refineries, coal mines, the oil drilling rig and a natural gas-fired power plant construction site, said Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Read more: Fort Worth Star-Telegram
