Chevron fire report shows troubled history
Jaxon Van Derbeken
Updated 10:55 pm, Friday, April 12, 2013
1A string of unheeded warning signs, missteps and lost opportunities spanned the decade leading up to last summer's disastrous fire at Chevron's Richmond refinery, according to the company's own investigation into the blaze.
In an 80-page report released Friday, Chevron also acknowledged it had mishandled the crude-oil pipeline leak that led to the Aug. 6 blaze - failing to recognize that the pipe's rupture could widen and spark a flash fire. The company said it would make dramatic changes in its training, crude-oil unit operations and emergency response.
"We have identified what went wrong and are taking steps to prevent a similar incident in the future," Nigel Hearne, the refinery's general manager, said in a statement.
Chevron has said it would not reopen the crude oil unit until it completed its final report on the causes of the fire, which sent a cloud of smoke and chemical vapor over Richmond and nearby cities that prompted 15,000 people to seek hospital treatment.
The release of Friday's report paves the way for Chevron to return the refinery to full operation as soon as next week. Cal/OSHA, the state's workplace safety agency, has authorized the restart after inspecting the crude-oil unit.
Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia, whose district includes the refinery and who chairs the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, welcomed the report as a step toward a full airing of the problems leading up to the fire.
He said the report underscored the need for a safety review at the refinery, which will be conducted in coming months by engineers who oversee compliance with the county's industrial safety ordinance.
'Tip of the iceberg'
"This report shows what is really the tip of the iceberg," Gioia said. "They need to change the way they collect information and the decision-making process on how they incorporate that information. We need to do a thorough review of the safety culture at the refinery."
In the report, Chevron traced the first missed opportunity to 2002, when a company inspector identified corrosion - the product of heated, sulfur-laden oil - near where the pipe eventually failed.
At the time, the pipe had lost about one-third of its wall thickness, Chevron said. Over the next decade, the 1976-vintage line corroded to the point it had lost 90 percent of its thickness - leaving less than a dime's width of metal by the time it ruptured.
2002 corrosion report
A company inspector logged his observation of the 2002 corrosion "as a comment" in his own file, Chevron's report said. The company said that limited the "ability for future decision makers to utilize the data."
The report did not explain why that was so. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board - the lead agency investigating the fire - has said the inspector urged supervisors to replace the pipe the next time the crude-oil unit was shut down for repairs.
Federal investigators - who are scheduled to release their own report on the fire Monday - have also said the inspector's findings were not the first warning sign about the corrosion at the Richmond crude-oil unit. Safety board officials say that in August 2002, before the inspector's report, an intern notified Chevron managers about the risk of corrosion and suggested that the carbon-steel pipes be replaced with more resistant material.
Refinery fire in Utah
Also in 2002, a Chevron refinery in Utah was damaged in a blaze caused by high-sulfur crude oil eating through the same kind of steel that the Richmond pipes were made of. The next year, Chevron told all its U.S. refineries to inspect carbon-steel pipes for corrosion - but the Richmond operators failed to do so for three years, then recommended only that monitoring continue, the company's report said Friday.
By 2009, Chevron had developed a company-wide plan to deal with sulfur corrosion at its refineries, but the Richmond refinery did not identify the piping that ultimately failed as a candidate for replacement, the report said.
'Blowout' warning
A year later, Chevron again warned its refineries that sulfur-caused corrosion was a source of "great concern because of the comparatively high likelihood of 'blowout' or catastrophic failure." The Richmond refinery took no special steps in response, according to the company report's timeline.
In the fall of 2011, after another fire in a carbon-steel pipe at Richmond, workers complained to Cal/OSHA that Chevron was ignoring corrosion dangers at the refinery. Company officials told the state that the fire had been an isolated incident, and Cal/OSHA accepted their explanation.
The final miscalculation happened the day of the fire itself, when refinery managers underestimated the dangers from a slow pipeline leak and allowed too many workers to cluster nearby. About 20 employees had to run for their lives when the leak suddenly ignited.
Since the blaze, the company said, it has inspected 4,600 individual pieces of equipment and piping that might be vulnerable to sulfur corrosion and replaced four pipes as a result. The company now pledges to inspect each part of its refinery, rather than sampling only segments of pipe.
Councilman's response
Tom Butt, a Richmond city councilman who has been critical of the company, said the report shows the refinery "has pretty much taken responsibility for what they did or didn't do" leading up to the fire.
He said he saw indications that Chevron will pay closer attention to criticism from now on.
"Sometimes they listen to themselves too much - they ought to listen to themselves last and listen to their critics more," Butt said. "This seems to be a step in that direction."
Jaxon Van Derbeken is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com