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BP has agreed to pay $13 million to settle proposed penalties from the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA, according to Reuters. OSHA officials inspected a BP facility in Texas City, Texas in 2009 as a follow up after a deadly explosion at a refinery in 2005. Fifteen workers were killed and 180 were injured.
BP plans to sell the facility, which refines 400,780 barrels of oil daily. BP will be able to sell the facility after the fines have been settled.
“It clears the table for a sale,” says John Auers, senior vice president of Turner, Mason and Co, a Dallas engineering consulting firm. “Any buyer of a facility wants that cleared out as much as possible.”
Hopefully any new owners of this facility will learn from BP’s mistakes. Some of the violations cited in 2009 were for failure to correct violations that lead to the 2005 accident. Brent Coon, a Texas plaintiff’s attorney, believes that individuals working at BP responsible for the accident should have been held accountable.
“The failure to prosecute management personnel individually has allowed the company to act with less haste than it would have otherwise,” said Coon.
BP was certainly quick to settle the fines once it decided to sell the facility. If you have been injured at a high-risk occupation and need to file for workers comp, call us today at (614) 221-7548.
Larrimer & Larrimer, LLC—Columbus workers comp attorneys.