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20 LateSt NewS, eveNtS, JobS oNLINe – www.PetroLPLaza.CoM

This month’s featured story from the UK’s Guardian national newspaper UK, Buncefield fire: Oil storage firm found guilty A company controlled by TOTAL and Chevron has been found guilty of host of grave safety failures that led to the Buncefield oil depot explosion and the largest fire in peacetime Europe. Hertfordshire Oil Storage Limited (HOSL), which was owned by the oil conglomerates, was found guilty of failing to prevent major accidents and limit their effects, it was revealed on June 18th.The guilty verdict followed one of the most complex corporate criminal trials of its kind and is a major blow for TOTAL, the major shareholder. It will also intensify global concern over the safety practices of international companies. BP’s Chief Executive, Tony Hayward, is under unrelenting pressure over safety lapses suspected to have caused the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, the cause of the largest offshore oil spill in US history. The Buncefield blast on 11st December 2005 had a magnitude of 2.4 and the subsequent plume which drifted across Europe was visible from space. The destruction at the depot came after a huge vapour cloud ignited when 250 000 litres of petrol leaked from one of its tanks. The explosion injured 43 people, destroyed homes and businesses and could be heard 125 miles away. Prosecutors said it was miraculous that there were no fatalities, a fact largely attributed to the accident happening early on a Sunday. The jury of 11 men and one woman were told that the environmental damage caused of safety breaches was still not known. The eight-week trial at St Albans crown court saw a range of criticisms of HOSL and TOTAL UK, which had three out of five directors on the company’s board and employed most of the staff on site. The court heard how there was no proper management chain at Buncefield, a failure to abide by baseline “good practice guidance”, “insufficient awareness” of the potential for an accident and no system for investigating near misses. Andrew Langdon QC, prosecuting in the Buncefield case on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive and Environment Agency, told the court that employers could have done much more to ensure staff could perform their jobs better at the site, near Hemel Hempstead. “Supervisors didn’t get much help or protection in what they did. They didn’t get any risk assessments worth their name – pretty essential you might think – how the tanks should be filled, how they should be emptied, what happens with all these considerations”, he said. Training manuals were found to be out of date and there was found to be a “degree of fatigue” among the supervisors tasked with keeping the depot safe. Contracts with companies who worked onsite were found to be insufficiently clear, with contractors unsure of lines of responsibly. Mr Justice Calvert-Smith, the judge who presided over the case, summarised there had been “a large number of failures with systems and procedures on site”. HOSL was found guilty on the Wednesday, but the verdict could not be reported until the next day, when the company’s lawyers brought the trial to a premature end by pleading guilty to additional charges relating to the causing of pollution to LateSt NewS, eveNtS, JobS JobS oNLINe – www.PetroLPLaza.CoM – www.PetroLPLaza.CoM Featured Story – buNCeFIeLd enter controlled waters underlying the vicinity around Buncefield. TOTAL, which owned a 60 percent stake in HOSL and previously admitted three health and safety breaches in connection with the explosion, and Chevron could be made to pay huge fines levied against HOSL when the company is sentenced next month. The charges carry unlimited fines, and the penalties could run into millions. Among the other companies implicated in the trial were the British Pipeline Agency, which admitted two charges relating to environmental damage. Guilty verdicts were also brought against two other companies linked to the Buncefield site. TAV Engineering, a Surrey-based company, designed a crucial safety-switch that should have alerted staff at the site that an oil tanker was over-flowing but failed. Motherwell Control Systems 2003, which had a maintenance contract for the site and installed and looked after the switch, was found guilty of the same charge. Motherwell Control Systems went into liquidation shortly after the disaster before reappearing at a nearby address “under another guise”, the court heard. The Health and Safety Executive and Environment Agency said in a statement: “When companies put workers and members of the public at risk and cause environmental damage we will prosecute. When the fire tore through the Buncefield site, these companies had failed to protect workers, members of the public and the environment. The scale of the explosion and fire at Buncefield was immense and it was miraculous that nobody died. Unless the high hazard industries truly learn the lessons, we may not be that fortunate in future.” 21 21

20 LateSt NewS, eveNtS, JobS oNLINe – www.PetroLPLaza.CoM

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