The Center for Public Integrity

A major U.S. refinery workers’ union says it will make prevention of catastrophic accidents the centerpiece of upcoming contract talks with oil companies. The union abandoned demands for additional safety measures in their last negotiation.

The United Steelworkers, which represents 30,000 workers at petrochemical facilities nationwide, crafted its bargaining position in response to the sorts of disasters and near-misses profiled in the Fueling Fears series by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News.

The series has found that the nation’s aging refineries are plagued by recurring equipment failures and sometimes-fatal fires, explosions and chemical releases that in many cases could have been prevented.

Specifically, the union is focusing on “process safety management” – steps that refineries can take to reduce the risk of catastrophic accidents, including tough self-inspections of equipment and repairing or replacing it when necessary.

“We’ve got time bombs out there, and we want to have a discussion with [oil companies] about it,” United Steelworkers International Vice President Gary Beevers, lead negotiator for the union, said last week. “We’ve got problems in these old refineries and we need changes…Partnering with this industry to make these refineries safer is my number one goal.”

California’s former top pesticide regulatory official dismissed safety guidelines suggested by her own staff scientists on the grounds that they were "excessive" and too onerous for the pesticide manufacturer, recently released internal documents show, California Watch reports.

In response, the scientists lodged a formal protest, calling the official’s actions “not scientifically credible,” according to the documents released by court order last week. 

The documents amount to a “smoking gun,” says Paul Blanc, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at UC San Francisco. Last year, Blanc helped advise the staff scientists on their evaluation of the pesticide, methyl iodide.

“The decision by the regulatory superiors was not science-based," Blanc said.

In one of the documents, Mary-Ann Warmerdam, who led the state's Department of Pesticide Regulation until this year, weighs a recommendation from her staff that farm workers be exposed to no more than a trace amount of methyl iodide per day. The recommendation – intended to protect farm workers from cancer and miscarriage – is "excessive and difficult to enforce," Warmerdam wrote in April 2010, about two weeks before the department made its recommendation that California approve methyl iodide. If the restrictions on methyl iodide were approved, she wrote, the pesticide manufacturer might find the recommendations "unacceptable, due to economic viability."

"(Warmerdam's) method was to consult with the pesticide manufacturer and determine what was acceptable to them, and then decide on what an acceptable level of exposure was," said Susan Kegley, a consulting scientist for the Pesticide Action Network, a group suing the state.