RICHMOND — The fire that stemmed from a corroded pipe at Chevron’s Richmond refinery in August 2012 resulted from regulatory shortcomings and a flawed safety culture within the company and was compounded by an inadequate emergency response by company crews, according to a final draft report released Thursday by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.
The CSB, a federal investigatory body that has released numerous reports on the fire over the last two years, will hold a public meeting at 6 p.m. on Jan. 28 in the Richmond City Council chamber.
The fire endangered 19 workers and sent more than 15,000 residents to local hospitals for medical attention.
“The CSB’s investigation report identifies gaps in current industry guidelines and shortcomings in Chevron’s safety culture and emergency response,” CSB Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso said in a news release. “Our previous reports on this accident have found numerous safety deficiencies that occurred over the years prior to the vapor release and fire as well as root causes and safety recommendations which we are pleased to see California has begun acting upon.”
In a statement released Friday, Chevron said it agreed with a number of findings in the report but “believes the CSB has presented an inaccurate depiction of the Richmond refinery’s current process safety culture. The refinery continues to move forward on a wide range of actions in response to the August 2012 incident. These will only build on our prior efforts aimed at a stronger, more transparent safety culture throughout our refinery network.”
Chevron also said its own investigation into the fire resulted in 15 recommended actions and 86 action items to address those recommendations, including “the inspection of over 140 piping circuits, representing some 12,000 individual piping components.”
The 132-page CSB report listed a series of missteps by the refinery that led to the fire and narrowly missed causing more serious injuries, including the failure in the 10 years before the fire to follow recommendations by knowledgeable personnel to inspect and upgrade vulnerable piping systems that eventually ruptured.
In terms of the emergency response when the pipe failed, spraying high-temperature hydrocarbons before igniting, officials on the scene attempted to stem the leak and did not fully understand the danger workers were in.
“This lack of knowledge of all potential causes of the 4-sidecut piping leak led the Incident Commander to direct emergency responders to take actions that may have ultimately exacerbated the leak and put many Chevron personnel in harm’s way,” according to the report. “It also led the incident commander to limit the ‘hot zone’ to a small area that did not consider the possibility of pipe rupture. When the 4-sidecut piping ruptured, personnel and firefighting equipment positioned in the ‘cold zone’ were engulfed in the large vapor cloud.”
The CSB also criticized the refinery’s “safety culture,” concluding that decision making “encourages continued operation of a unit despite hazardous leaks,” and a “reluctance among employees” to speak up and stop work due to perceived hazards.
The CSB recommended that the county, which touts its Industrial Safety Ordinance regulations as the nation’s most rigorous, should make changes as well.
The CSB called on the county to develop of an “oversight committee comprised of the regulator, the company, the workforce and their representatives and community representatives.”
Contact Robert Rogers at 510-262-2726. Follow him at Twitter.com/sfbaynewsrogers.
