Revisiting the BP Texas City explosion

Five years before the Deepwater Horizon, there was Texas City.

BP’s Texas City refinery was the second biggest such refinery in Texas and the third biggest in the country. On March 23, 2005, a fire and explosion ripped through the plant, with 15 deaths and over 170 injuries. As a result, BP was slammed with federal criminal charges for violating environmental laws and was later hit with an $87 million fine from OSHA for failure to improve safety standards after the explosion.

Before the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform, Texas City was the poster child for BP’s rap sheet of reckless safety operations. 
    
Just two months before the explosion, a safety inspector wrote of the Texas City plant, “We have never seen a site where the notion ‘I could die today’ was so real.”

An investigating board uncovered numerous instances of BP neglect in eliminating or upgrading unsafe and out of date venting and blow-down systems to prevent dangerous atmospheric conditions in the years before the explosion. Even after the disaster, three safety incidents occurred, resulting in the record $87 million fine.

(Data obtained from Wikipedia)