"We continue to believe we are in full compliance with the Settlement Agreement ... we strongly disagree with OSHA's conclusions," said Texas City Refinery Manager Keith Casey. "We believe our efforts at the Texas City refinery to improve process safety performance have been among the most strenuous and comprehensive that the refining industry has ever seen."
BP says it invested $1 billion on safety and operational improvements at the refinery and believed it had more time to fulfill its commitments under the settlement agreement, according to a letter that BP attorney Thomas Wilson sent to OSHA. BP may end up fighting the charges in federal court.
Still, as highlighted in a January 2007 report issued by a panel chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker III, systemic issues related to BP's process safety were not limited to its Texas City refinery, but rather were widespread.
During an inspection last September, OSHA found that BP was in compliance with the earlier agreement but discovered "numerous violations at the plant not previously covered" by the settlement.
In March, OSHA issued a new set of charges against BP in March for "willful" violations at Husky, "including 39 on a per-instance basis, and 20 alleged serious violations for exposing workers to a variety of hazards including failure to provide adequate pressure relief for process units," issues that appear to be identical to those that led to the Texas City explosion in 2005.
"OSHA has found that BP often ignored or severely delayed fixing known hazards in its refineries," Solis said. "There is no excuse for taking chances with people's lives. BP must fix the hazards now."
Also notable about the nearly two dozen alleged violations at Husky was that one matches allegations leveled against BP a year ago by a whistleblower who said the company had been operating its Gulf Coast drilling platform Atlantis without a majority of the necessary engineering and design documents, a violation of federal law.
Atlantis is the world's largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans. The whistleblower said BP was risking a catastrophic oil spill even worse than the disaster now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded and sank two weeks ago.
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