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Oil refinery companies in the U.S. face tough inspections after a tragic refinery accident failed to get one oil company to change its safety policies.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) plans to inspect every oil refinery under its jurisdiction to insure that conditions are safe for workers.

Hawaii worker safety should benefit from changes in OSHA’s policies following the end of its investigation into a BP refinery accident that killed 15 workers and injured more than 100.

These new policies should dramatically increase worker safety at Hawaii’s two oil refineries.

The agency is in the process of hiring new refinery inspectors to keep up with the project. So far, according to Edwin G. Foulke Jr., OSHA’s Assistant Secretary for Labor, 160 people have been trained in the inspection process, called Process Safety Management, or PSM. By August of this year, he said, 280 PSM-trained inspectors should be on board. The goal is to inspect every refinery.

The deadly accident at the BP refinery was in the spring of 2005 outside Houston. The plant lost its processing capacity, taking 3% of the total U.S. refinery production out of business. Partly as a result, gas prices soared in the summer of 2006. The plant had hired 1,800 employees to process 433,000 barrels of crude oil daily.

Six months after that disaster, in which flames shot thousands of feet into the air and ash fell on the surrounding region, OSHA inspected another BP plant - this one in Ohio. It found conditions there exactly like those that caused the catastrophe near Houston. BP had not learned its lessons and had not fixed the problem, the U.S. Department of Labor determined. As a result, OSHA decided oil companies had no intention of protecting their workers. The agency began the tough inspections.

OSHA and its state affiliates conducted more than 100 inspections at U.S. refineries, and in 2007 have inspected 50 more plants so far.

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