By Bob Ruff and Carol Costello, CNN
(CNN) – The fiery explosion that cost 11 workers their lives on the Deepwater Horizon has the nation focused on the dangers of deep water oil and gas drilling. But what about what happens on land? It turns out that the oil and gas industry’s track record isn’t very good there either.
Here are just a few of the accidents during the past two months:
April 2nd – An explosion at BP's Tesoro refinery in Washington State killed seven.
May 5th – Two were injured in an AGE refinery fire in San Antonio.
May 17th – Another fire broke out at LyondellBasell’s Houston refinery.
Add up all the U.S. refinery and rig fires since April 1 and you find 13 fires, 19 deaths and 25 injured.
Kim Nibarger, who directs the United Steel Workers Union’s safety group, was in Washington Thursday testifying before the Senate’s Employment and Workplace Safety Subcommittee about the dangers to workers at refineries. Nibarger has witnessed those dangers firsthand. 12 years ago, he saw a BP refinery explode in Anacortes, Washington. Six workers died.
“I live that nightmare in 1998 every day,” he told us. “I mean it hurts me. I know what the families go through. And it needs to come to a stop. People shouldn't have to die just because they went to work.”
Oil industry representatives insist that their industry is safe. We asked Bob Greco of the American Petroleum Institute if all of those fires over the past two months show that the oil and gas refiners have a real safety problem on their hands. Greco said, “We'd like to look at that data and see if there's a trend or something that can be addressed broadly–or if it's related to individual facilities.”
Safety experts have wanted the oil industry to do that for years. They say that refiners do have a pretty good safety record when it comes to accidents such as slips and falls on the job, but that’s not the case when they look at equipment and operational failures.
John Bresland, chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB), is concerned that the structural parts of some refineries are just not safe. “If I got on an airline,” he told CNN, “and they said, well, we've got a terrific safety record with our slips, trips, and falls, and our baggage handlers are really safe—but maybe we're not quite as safe on the process side, the running airline, I would have serious doubts about getting on that airline. I think the same analogy applies in the oil industry.”
Recently Bresland wrote about the continuing dangers facing workers at refineries. “Refinery accidents [at BP and] at other companies continue to occur with dismaying frequency.”
Jordan Barab is with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). On Thursday he also testified before the Senate subcommittee. “The status quo,” he told senators, “is not working.”
OSHA is the government agency responsible for protecting America's workers, and has used fines to try to rein in BP. After serious incidents at BP's facilities in Texas City and Toledo, Ohio, OSHA, according to the Center for Public Integrity, slapped BP with 862 citations between June 2007 and February 2010. OSHA told CNN it levied $87 million in fines on BP because it was slow to correct the violations.
But OSHA, the Steelworkers Union, and other safety experts caution that while BP might be the biggest offender - it isn't the only one. We asked Kim Nibarger what goes through his mind when he sees the number of refinery fires during the past two months.
“It looks like we're going to have another year just like last year–and the year before. It's a continuing problem.”