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The oil refinery industry apparently has no intention of voluntarily protecting workers from the kind of disaster that took the lives of 15 employees and injured more than 100 at a refinery near Houston, TX.

That’s the conclusion of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA.

As a result, OSHA is conducting meticulous inspections of every refinery in the nation that is under its jurisdiction.

That will be good news for Kentucky residents and a positive move toward greater Kentucky worker safety.

Some may remember the refinery tragedy near Houston during the spring of 2005. A plant owned and operated by BP blew up, resulting in the deaths and injuries. Flames shot into the air thousands of feet above the site, and debris fell on the area surrounding the refinery.

The plant near Houston had employed 1,800 workers. It processed 433,000 barrels of crude oil every day. The explosion essentially took 3% of the country’s total production out of commission, and by the summer of 2006, gasoline prices skyrocketed.

Six months later, OSHA inspected another plant, this one in Ohio. It found that BP had made no corrections to the problems that caused the Houston tragedy, and embarked on the inspection program. Safety at refineries has become a major priority of OSHA, particularly after a hearing on the report by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Inspection Board (CSB) addressing the Houston refinery disaster.

OSHA inspected 100 refineries in 2006. In 2007 it has inspected another 50 so far. Meanwhile the agency is hiring and training more refinery inspectors. It has trained more than 160 people in the guidelines for inspections under the Process Safety Management plan, or PSM, according to Edwin G. Foulke Jr., Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA. By August of this year, he predicted, the agency should have 280 PSM-trained inspectors.

The goal is to inspect every refinery under OSHA’s authority through the new National Emphasis Program.

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