Postscript to the Texas City Fire

Someone posted an interesting comment about the refinery fire in Texas last week:

What's truely amazing to me is the revelation today that there was a flash fire at the same unit the previous day. I work for one of the (oil) majors, and when a flash fire happens during a turnaround, all work stops until we find out why it happened and take steps to insure it doesn't happen again. To be back at work the next day would be very, very fast. Too fast in most cases to properly review, decide on corrective action, and communicate it to the men doing the work. With the limited info available today, it's a presumptuous to conclude that BP failed to properly investigate and rectify the previous incident. But it sure sounds damning.

I whole-heartedly agree. I think that with refineries running at greater than capacity due to the shortage of gasoline, they may have cut corners. It does happen and then they end up spending millions more in litigation, repairing the damage and lost production when they could have just as easily fixed the discrepancy. This is typical of quite a few industries unfortunately.

I do not know if the person who posted the comment works for a BP competitor.