Big Fines, big blame
Jordan Barab
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OSHA Seeks $8.7 Million Fine Against Sugar Company
ATLANTA — Imperial Sugar, the owner of a refinery near Savannah where 13 workers died in a sugar dust explosion in February, knew of safety hazards at the plant as early as 2002 but did nothing, and should pay more than $8.7 million for safety violations, the head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration said Friday.
The proposed penalty is the third-largest in OSHA's history. Imperial Sugar will contest the findings, the company announced Friday.
At a news conference in Savannah, Edwin G. Foulke Jr., the OSHA chief, said, "The investigation concluded that this catastrophic incident could have been prevented if Imperial Sugar had complied with existing OSHA safety and health standards."
The company's senior management was fully aware of the combustible dust hazards, Mr. Foulke said, and did not take any appropriate action to eliminate them.
The fire, which burned for a week, started when sugar dust, which is highly combustible, was ignited in the plant by a large bucket that broke loose in a storage silo and struck a metal siding, causing a spark, according to OSHA's investigation. Even when plants are regularly cleaned, dust can build up on ledges, pipes and other hard-to-reach places. The fire renewed calls for OSHA to issue regulations specifically designed to prevent combustible dust explosions, which can occur in many industries.
In addition to the fatalities, the fire injured 40 people, three of whom are still in a hospital burn unit, and shocked the small community of Port Wentworth, Ga., where it seemed that almost every family had some connection to the 91-year-old sugar plant. Imperial Sugar won praise when it promised to rebuild the plant and continue to pay workers.
The company has written that before the Feb. 7 explosion, "There was an insufficient understanding of the hazards of combustible dusts both within the sugar industry and within the Occupational Safety and Health Administration."
But Mr. Foulke said that even after the explosion, company officials had not acted to alleviate similar conditions at its plant in Gramercy, La., despite a warning from OSHA. An inspection of that plant five weeks after the Georgia fire found sugar dust four feet thick in some spots, he said, prompting OSHA to issue an emergency order closing the plant, an action the agency characterized in a news release as "extremely rare."
"I am convinced that our actions prevented a second terrible accident at the Gramercy facility," Mr. Foulke said.
The proposed penalties include more than $5 million for violations at the Port Wentworth plant, with 120 violations, and $3.7 million at the Gramercy plant, with 91. The violations included failure to clean up dust, the use of spark-producing electrical equipment, and faulty ventilation and dust collection systems.
John Sheptor, the chief executive of Imperial Sugar, issued a statement that read in part: "We believe that the facts do not merit the allegations made. As we go forward, we will continue to focus on the safety of our employees and our contractors."
Eric Frumin, the health and safety coordinator for the labor union federation Change to Win, said the fines could have been much higher if OSHA had regulations for combustible dust. The agency found 118 "egregious" violations, a category in which the agency counts each instance in which a violation occurs.
But per-instance violations can be cited only where the agency has specific standards. In this case, ventilation and dust collection issues fell under the agency's "general duty" clause, which allows it to cite employers for unsafe practices not specifically addressed in the regulations. So while there were 44 violations issued for spark-producing electrical equipment, which is regulated, under the general duty clause there were only two, one at each plant, for faulty ventilation and two for failing to maintain dust collection systems.
"It's basically an admission that their standards have gaps," Mr. Frumin said.
The federal Chemical Safety Board called on OSHA to issue dust standards in 2006, after a series of fatal events. After the Port Wentworth fire, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require OSHA to issue dust-related rules based on recommendations from the National Fire Prevention Association.
Next week, Imperial Sugar representatives are expected to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety, which is considering a similar bill. According to a copy of the company's planned testimony, Imperial Sugar welcomes dust regulation.
"It is our view that a clear standard would assist employers in understanding the hazards of combustible dust and the means to reduce or prevent such hazard," the testimony says.
Graham H. Graham, who joined Imperial Sugar as vice president for operations last November, is expected to testify that he identified serious safety concerns before the February explosion.
The company's testimony quotes from documents written by Mr. Graham in January indicating that he had seen significant improvement at the two plants.
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Reports on Mine Collapse Criticize Operation and Oversight
Family members of miners killed after a huge collapse at a Utah mine last year expressed outrage on Friday after two federal reports showed that the mine had long been dangerous.
The reports, released Thursday, also faulted the mine's operators for continuing to pull coal from deep within the mine despite the dangers and the government regulators for failing to stop them.
"If everything was as bad as it was, then the men shouldn't have been in there," said Nelda Erickson, whose husband, Don, was one of six miners killed when the mine's coal pillars burst last Aug. 6. Three rescue workers died trying to reach them after another collapse 10 days later.
"It's hard to swallow," Ms. Erickson said. "I don't understand how the company got approval to do mining that deep underground."
The mine's operator, Genwal Resources, was heavily criticized in one of the reports, released by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, which found that the company had kept working in the Crandall Canyon mine despite indications that it was unsafe.
A second report, by the Labor Department, took the mine safety agency itself to task for approving Genwal's mining plan in the first place and for not taking full control of the rescue operation after the initial collapse.
In Utah's close-knit coal country, those who knew the dead miners seemed relieved at the revelation that the sheer force of the collapses, as described in the reports, most likely killed their loved ones relatively quickly.
But there was also a visceral anger and even disbelief at the notion laid out in the reports that the Crandall Canyon mine was probably destined for trouble long before the initial accident and that their loved ones' fates might have been sealed months before the collapses.
"They had those men working in a section they knew was doomed to fail," said Terry Byrge, whose son-in-law, Brandon Kimber, died in the failed rescue mission. "They were playing spin the bottle with their lives every day and taking a chance on whether those men would come out alive."
The mine safety agency's report criticized Genwal, a subsidiary of the Murray Energy Corporation, for withholding information from federal regulators about three coal bursts at the mine, one of them just three days before the Aug. 6 collapse.
"The failure to report those bounces denied MSHA the opportunity to evaluate the conditions of the mine," said the director of the mine safety agency, Richard E. Stickler, in a telephone interview.
That and numerous other safety violations, like Genwal's removal of coal that was propping up the mine's roof, led the agency to assess $1.6 million in fines against the company for its role in the collapse. That is the highest coal mine fine in the agency's history.
The agency also levied $220,000 in fines against a mine consulting company, Agapito Associates, for providing Genwal with a faulty engineering analysis of the Crandall Canyon mine, which contributed to the collapse, according to the report.
In a statement, Genwal said the report "appears to have been tainted in part by 10 months of relentless political clamoring to lay blame for these tragic events."
A spokeswoman for Agapito did not return phone calls seeking comment. Both companies can contest the fines.
Although the mine safety agency garnered some praise for candor in its own report and for improvements over the past two years, like the hiring of 322 coal mining enforcement personnel and more intense reviews of deep mining practices, some in the industry remain skeptical about the agency's capacity for long-term change. This is particularly true given the Labor Department's criticism of the safety agency in its report.
Tony Oppegard, a lawyer who represents miners and their families, and a former federal mine safety official, said that the hiring of additional inspectors was no substitute for strengthening federal mining laws.
A bill, written by Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, that would beef up mine safety regulations is being opposed by Mr. Stickler, the federal mine safety director.
"How the head of mine safety could oppose this is beyond me," Mr. Oppegard said.
Mr. Stickler said the bill did not allow enough flexibility to put the improvements into effect and imposed "unrealistic" time frames on the agency.
Cecil E. Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said in a statement: "There is more to this tragedy than the greed of a coal operator causing workers to be put in harm's way. The fact is that companies like Murray Energy are supposed to be kept in check by MSHA. That did not happen at Crandall Canyon."
Nelda Erickson recalls her husband, a veteran miner, returning home from Crandall Canyon and telling her of how the mine would sometimes shudder violently when he was underground.
"I think a lot of the guys were worried," Ms. Erickson said. "They were just hoping it didn't happen to them.
"We don't want families to go through what we've gone through. It's too hard."