SEATTLE — Tesoro Corp.’s Anacortes refinery, where an April explosion and fire killed seven people, will remain closed at least through September, a company spokesman said Thursday.
Lynn Westfall, a senior vice president with the San Antonio-based petroleum company, said investigators haven’t yet found the cause of the accident and only in the last week or two were able to send equipment involved in the blast to a laboratory to be analyzed.
Tesoro earlier had said the refinery would be closed through June. But Westfall said it still has to clean up the burned area, make repairs and install new equipment, which will take months.
Other parts of the refinery can still function, he said, but the plant can’t make finished and marketable products without the extensively damaged unit.
The April 2 explosion and fireball at the refinery about 70 miles north of Seattle is being investigated by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, the state of Washington and company officials.
Tesoro said the accident occurred when a unit that processes naphtha, a highly flammable chemical, was being returned to service after routine maintenance. Experts say the startup process is especially dangerous because boilers heat the liquid to high temperatures at great pressure.
Federal investigators have said all seven victims were within 50 feet of the unit and had no chance of escaping.
Kim Nibarger, a health and safety specialist with the United Steelworkers union, told a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., Thursday that “the high number of fatalities at Tesoro was the result of too many people being where they didn’t need to be.”
Nibarger, a former worker at what is now a Shell Oil Co. refinery at Anacortes, said he was visiting his parents at the time and felt the Tesoro explosion.
Westfall said Tesoro would not speculate on a cause of the accident until a full investigation has been completed. “We know there were a lot of people there, but can’t speculate on why they were there and whether it was justified,” he said.
Representatives from the federal investigative board did not immediately return a telephone call, but Hector Castro, spokesman for Washington’s Department of Labor &Industries, said the state’s investigation into the cause and possible safety violations should be completed by early October.
The Senate hearing was called by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., to look into petroleum industry accidents, including the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. She said she found it “outrageous” that representatives of BP PLC were invited to testify but declined.
Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of labor for Occupational Safety and Health, told the panel that OSHA stepped up its inspections of refineries and petrochemical plants in 2007 following the explosion two years earlier that killed 15 and injured more than 170 at BP’s Texas City, Texas, refinery. The agency had found BP committed more than 300 willful violations at the Texas plant.
OSHA inspectors are frustrated with the industry, because there’s “a clear indication that essential safety lessons are not being learned,” Barab said.
“Not only are we finding a significant lack of compliance during our inspections, but time and again our inspectors are finding the same violations,” he said.
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