A Flint Hills Corpus Refinery Subcontractor dies from falling off a ladder in the West plant Friday. This, I feel, is just another example of where the real safety problem and issue lies for all US refineries. Major construction firms hire lots of subcontractor and most of the high level safety training at refineries hardly makes it through the upper management of the major firms and barely into their workforce let alone into the subcontractors they hire to keep cost down.
It is the problem of outsourcing the work and the safety responsibility along with it that is causing problems for refineries. The refineries still have a high focus and concentration on safety for their workforce but often there isn’t the same level of over-sight for contractors and their subcontractors.
Valero would be at positive end of this spectrum, recently it won a safety award, where for the first time in history a refinery had all (7) of its primary contractors certified as “Star Site” for its Bill Greehey Refinery (http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=VLO&script=410&layout=-6&item_id=900981).
And BP would be at the other end due recent problems/115 lawsuits from Texas City accident & as an example of the other extreme – it was a BP subcontractor that parked the work trailer next to the fence/work area; it was mostly subcontractors that were killed & injured, and it was subcontractors that had installed the wrong kind of pipe / metallurgy that failed despite BP employee orders not to do it.
This area should be highlighted as major fault line – refinery safety programs need to take control of making sure not only contractors but also the subcontractors the contractors hire are certified AND follow the same standards their own people do. Outsourcing the work is ok – Outsourcing the safety is a time bomb.
