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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
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– 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.”
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