BP had "significant" safety deficiencies at all five of its US refineries, an independent panel that was set up to probe a deadly blast in Texas in 2005 said on Tuesday.
In a 374-page report, the committee, chaired by former US secretary of state James Baker, assailed the lack of a rigorous safety culture at the British energy giant's US operations.
It found that "instances of a lack of operating discipline, toleration of serious deviations from safe operating practices and apparent complacency towards serious process safety risks existed at each of the US refineries."
PHOTO: AP
BP said it intended to implement the panel's recommendations and noted that it had already taken a number of "significant actions" to improve the safety of its plants.
"This is about getting to a standard of excellence," outgoing BP chief John Browne told a press conference in Houston, via video link from London.
The panel was set up on the US government's recommendation following the enormous explosion at BP's Texas City refinery in March 2005, which killed 15 people and injured 180.
"BP has not provided effective process safety leadership in making certain its management and US refining workforce understand what is expected of them regarding safety performance," the panel said in a statement.
It said that "BP tended to have a short-term focus in its US refining operations," and said the US refineries lacked a common safety culture guided by clear expectations from management.
It also noted that the problems it found were not unique to BP and recommended that other oil companies reexamine their safety practices. That sentiment was echoed by federal industrial accident investigators.
"This is an opportunity for review and reform on a worldwide scale," Carolyn Merritt, chairwoman of the US Chemical Safety Board, said in response to the Baker panel's report.
"The panel's findings present a landmark opportunity for the boards of directors and executives of oil and chemical companies throughout the world to re-examine their own safety cultures and ask whether they are sufficiently investing in the people, procedures and equipment that will make their workplaces safe from catastrophic accidents," she added.
Merritt accused BP of letting "overzealous cost-cutting" undermine safety in a preliminary report on the Texas City explosion issued in November. The full report is expected on March 20.
The Baker panel, however, found no evidence that BP purposely overlooked the importance of operational safety or that it had made cuts to its safety budget.
Brown defended the company's record. "We've never focused on profits above safety -- safety has always come first," he said.
The panel did find, however, that BP mistakenly interpreted improving personal injury rates as an indication of acceptable safety performance at its US refineries.
That "created a false sense of confidence" about BP's safety culture, the report concluded.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
RSS