When a Company Ignores 575 Safety Violations
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ส.ค. 2023
- The in-depth story of the Phillips 66 Explosion disaster of 1989.
It’s October 23, 1989. Workers perform routine maintenance on Reactor 6 at the gigantic Houston Chemical Complex in Pasadena. It’s not a complicated procedure, but it still calls for caution. The high-pressure reactor is filled with a cocktail of highly flammable material. There's no room for mistakes.
Step by step, workers follow the maintenance procedure. Suddenly, a deafening hiss pierces the air as the reactor violently releases its entire content into the factory yard. Engulfing everything in a cloud of combustible vapors. The workers know it takes only a tiny spark to blow everything up, so they start to run.
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It's crazy to think about how a company could have $915 million dollars in damages, $700 million in lost income, a fine of 4 million for safety violations and untold millions of dollars in civil suits by the victims and their families. And yet after all that, the company keeps going on. That is a company that is making WAY too much money. 😳
Slapping these companies with fines is absolutely disgusting. These people need to be scared with actual jail time. Proof that it happened again saying enough
That they were only fined 4 million is criminal - ridiculously low number considering people died
I have to respect the OSHA staff when they are able to piece together a disaster from piles of burnt rubble.
My grandpa worked there during the explosion as a fire safety person. The only reason he survived the explosion was because he took the day off to repair one of his son's cars since there were no mechanics around. The dude in his control chair covering his shift wasn't as lucky.
As messed as it is the company only got a slap on the wrist, I admire the community of local firefighters and other company firefighters pitching in to help
I lived in Houston at the time and my neighbor was involved in financial services. He told me a plant he was investigating in channel view had many OSHA violations and regularly paid out one to one point two million to the families of workers killed there,plus hundreds of thousands in fines. When asked why,the management said it would cost 330 million to make the plant safe but only 4 or 5 million to kill the workers,any damage being covered by insurance. Corporate lawyers and accountants will kill for profit. Until there is accountability for actions,political and financial,this will continue.
It's unacceptable that the rich men, who chose to ignore the safety of the workers, were not punished. Instead of fining the corporation, which means the cost was passed on to us, the rich men responsible should have been personally fined and have future jail sentences if they persisted with their disregard for others.
if I had a dollar for every single company that only receives minor punishment...
When your work screwup registers on the Richter scale, it's a bad day.
My father was a mine manager, new to a mine. He did his inspections, wrote-up an action plan with revenue numbers and met with the board of directors.
Imagine if a police officer caught you speeding, resulting in the death of someone, then handed you a fine for say $600, and you could just say "Yeah, nah... I'll pay you 400, so long as you say I did no wrong."
Punishing multi-million/billion dollar businesses with only fines for negligent homicide is quite literally getting away with murder
Absolute mad lads testing the limits. Glad we now know 574 is the most safety violations possible.
Companies don't give a toss about worker safety. It's all about keeping the machinery running and the money coming in and nothing going out. I had a very good friend who was killed in a sulfuric acid leak at a paper mill where I was a security guard. It was determined that a valve, which had been reported as having issues, finally gave way. A replacement valve would have cost only $25 but the downtime of the machine would have been thousands so they never replaced the valve until after tragedy struck.
My husband was at a carwash in Deer Park and saw the initial explosion. He said he felt it and looked up to see a huge black mushroom cloud. Sadly, when we were still living across the channel in Baytown, hearing and feeling booms, flares going at all hours, and even the emergency sirens going off on a regular basis was pretty much normal. Exxon, ARCO, Chevron, and Shell all had something happen when I lived there.
Ignoring 574 safety violations is generally considered safe but these guys just took it too far
Disasters like this can ONLY be prevented in future by sentencing the top brass of these companies to long jail sentences. THAT is when unsafe, cost-cutting practices will stop. Simply imposing a fine on these companies has never worked and will never work.
"There's no room for mistakes"
I worked as an injection molding machine operator for 2 years. During my time there, I had been burned by molten plastic twice though neither were severe. However, once it gets on you, the only thing you can do is let it cool or run it under cold water. Molten plastic is like lava, sticky and viscous. Trying to wipe it off will spread it further. I can only imagine how horrific it was for the two burned alive by it in the second incident.