For many who have had careers committed to safe workplaces, it’s a bit of a heartbreak to see that Dupont, once a pinnacle of safety, is now placed in OSHA’s “Severe Violator Enforcement Program.” This action is the result of investigations spawned by the deadly chemical leak at the La Porte, TX facility last November. The leak claimed the lives of four workers and hospitalized another. Sandy Smith reports in her EHS Today article, OSHA Revisits DuPont Facility Where Four Workers Died, Issues More Citations:
In his remarks about the enforcement action against the company, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health David Michaels took aim at the company’s reputation for safety. “DuPont promotes itself as having a ‘world-class safety’ culture and even markets its safety expertise to other employers, but these four preventable workplace deaths and the very serious hazards we uncovered at this facility are evidence of a failed safety program,” said Michaels.
Neena Satija and Jim Malewitz report in the Texas Tribune: New OSHA Penalties for DuPont After Deadly Leak
“We have concerns about the safety culture,” David Michaels, the agency’s director, said in an interview Thursday. “We expect chemical facilities where highly toxic materials are used to have a culture that focuses on ensuring worker protection. It appears to have broken down.”
In a May interview with The Texas Tribune, Michaels called the initial $99,000 fine “petty cash” for the multibillion-dollar company and said he wished he could dole out harsher penalties.
On Thursday, he said fines matter little for any company that large, but shining a spotlight on a company that has long touted a goal of “zero safety incidents” will send a message to employers nationwide.”
A must-read account: Up In the Tower
In reading accounts of the November chemical disaster, it’s apparent that this came very close to being much worse – not just for plant workers, but also the larger community.
We call your attention to Up in the Tower, an excellent and eye-opening article in Texas Monthly by Lise Olsen that dissects the events leading up to and during the tragic November day. It lays bare many of the failures, warning signs and build up to the day’s events. By painting portraits of the deceased workers and their actions, it also puts a human face on the tragedy.
Olsen outlines how Dupont’s fall from grace began a number of years ago, a result of many factors: pressure to increase profits for shareholders, corporate restructurings, high turnover with more experienced workers retiring or leaving and being replaced by less experienced workers. Dupont experienced prior safety failures leading to fatalities:
DuPont experts continue to deliver lectures at global safety conferences and make millions peddling their safety programs to other companies, with results that they say have been proved. But the corporation’s pristine safety reputation suffered after toxic releases killed two workers at chemical complexes in New York and West Virginia. One longtime DuPont employee was fatally poisoned in 2010 after cheap plastic tubing burst inside a shed at DuPont’s plant in Belle, West Virginia, dousing him with phosgene, a gas that had been used as a chemical weapon in World War I. That same year, an explosion killed a contract welder and injured his co-worker in Buffalo, New York. They hadn’t been warned of a possible gas buildup inside the tank they were repairing. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, a small federal agency that investigates the nation’s worst industrial chemical accidents, reviewed both cases and criticized DuPont. Company officials had failed to follow their own maintenance and safety rules, the board said. “In light of this, I would hope that DuPont officials are examining the safety culture company-wide,” the board’s former chairman John Bresland announced in July 2011.
OSHA is trying to compensate for the low fines by shining a spotlight on the company’s practices so an article like Olsen’s may have wider exposure than the typical OSHA releases, which tend to mainly garner coverage in trade publications. Certainly, the fines are little comfort to the surviving families, as Olsen notes:
The penalties and company assurances seem small to Gilbert and his family. He and his wife canceled the big fiftieth-wedding-anniversary party they’d planned with all four of their children. Their sons’ smiling faces appear in the family portraits that line their shelves and walls, but family gatherings are more somber now. Gibby’s widow comes alone; Robert’s wife is raising their young children without him. Gilbert has accepted that Robert died trying to rescue his co-worker. He takes some comfort knowing that Gibby helped save another man’s life and perished trying to save his brother. His sons died heroically, but, he says, their deaths could have been easily prevented if their employer, a multibillion-dollar corporation, had invested in upgrades and followed its own rules. “It wasn’t necessary for them to die.”
— Reader comment from our mailbox —
Good Morning.
I was the carrier claims service representative for E. I. DuPont de Nemours from the late 80’s through most of the 90’s at both the Belle, WV plant, as well as, Waynesboro and Martinsville, VA. In the conduct of my responsibilities there, I became somewhat familiar and was impressed by the safety culture at these plants. It’s sad to see this strong emphasis on “Safety First” deteriorate to this point.
I would hope that the pursuit of profit wasn’t a cause of this change in attitude, or the weakening of union influence on safety matters by collusion or desperation for jobs, but it’s hard to think of another explanation.
Regards,
R.S.L, AIC
