Our law firm has been working hard on obtaining documentation and other evidence to help us determine the circumstances of the fire. We also just recently finished the first round of depositions of company witnesses, in which the witnesses were required to answer our questions under oath.
So far, this is what we have uncovered:
- The company designated this as a "Level 4" fire, which is the highest possible safety alert level at this plant;
- Many plant workers were subject to an "immediate evacuation" order;
- The company's corporate representative testified that all of the contract workers were justified in treating the fire as a "run for your life" scenario;
- Many injuries were reported (but not to the media - for unknown reasons, the company told the media there were "no injuries");
- The fire occurred because an employee of the company did not follow procedure while operating one of the strainers, which caused it to blow out and spew scalding hot LVGO fluid on to other equipment, igniting the fluid;
- The reason the employee did not follow company procedure is because the strainer had a long known history of "plugging";
- Unit 536 supervision was long aware of the "plugging" problem;
- Unit 536 supervision was long aware that employees had to violate procedure in order to operate the strainers with the "plugging" problem;
- One cause of the "plugging" problem related to the poor design of the company's strainer;
- The strainer in question lacked a piece of instrumentation that would have given critical information to the employee, which would have enabled the employee to avoid the strainer blow out;
- After the company completed its in-house investigation, it did not preserve the strainer that failed - instead, the company threw it away.
Unfortunately, it took a maximum alert level fire that could have blown up the entire refinery before Lyondell and Houston Refining decided to replace the defective strainer equipment. The multi-million dollar price tag on this equipment change likely had something to do with the company's "wait-and-see" attitude.
Many additional company witness depositions are scheduled, and many more document requests to the company are pending. Also pending is a motion by the injured workers asking the Judge to make a ruling on the company's destruction of critical evidence (the legal term for this is "spoliation").
