Authorities have begun a criminal investigation in to the blast at a natural gas plant in Connecticut that killed five workers last Sunday. It takes a few dead workers for them to launch anything of this nature. "If everything went right, we wouldn't all be here right now," said Sebastian Giuliano the Mayor of Middletown where the explosion occurred. "There's a point where negligence raises to the level of criminal conduct, and that's what we're investigating.", he adds.
This is all well and good but this explosion is not the first accident of this nature. Folks will remember the explosion at the BP plant in Texas that killed 13 workers and injured 170 more. B.P. stands for British Petroleum, not Beyond Petroleum I should add. This is an advantage during periods of protectionist sentiment and heightened nationalism. BP was fined $87.4 million by OSHA for failing to make safety corrections at the refinery in the aftermath of the accident. OSHA hit BP with a $21 million fine back in 2005 and the company promised to make safety improvements over the next four years. OSHA was not satisfied, hence, the new fine last November.
Right after the accident, the Chemical Safety Board found that in order to keep profits up BP had cut down on safety measures at the plant and that this was one of the main causes of the tragedy.
There was yet another explosion in 2008 at an Imperial Sugar refinery in Georgia that killed 13 workers.
Investigators are trying to determine the cause of the Middletown explosion to see if it related to other similar explosions around the country. In these instances, workers were attempting to remove gas from pipelines, a process called "purging"and this is what was occurring at the plant in Middletown. Workers were sending nitrogen through the line followed by natural gas to clear out any moisture. Just a few days before the accident, the US Chemical Safety Board issued "urgent" safety recommendations for purging.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the recommendations came about because of a similar accident at a ConAgra plant in NC which killed 4 people and injured 67.
ConAgra is a notorious corporate criminal. Its plant in Longmont, Colorado, had the highest rate of salmonella among all the turkey processors tested by the Department during 2001. Nearly half of the turkeys processed at ConAgra’s Longmont, Colorado, facility were contaminated with harmful Salmonella bacteria, compared with a rate of 13 percent for the industry at large according to the consumer advocacy organization, Center for Science in the Public Interest. (Wiki)
ConAgra was responsible for the demolition of one of the largest sites on the National Registrar of Historic Places when it destroyed over 20 historic structures in "Jobbers Canyon," a 19th century warehouse district along the banks of the Missouri River in Downtown Omaha, Nebraska. The demolition was performed to make room for a sprawling new corporate campus, and prompted protests and lawsuits from historic preservationists. Charles Harper, the chief executive of ConAgra at the time, described the structures as "some big, ugly red brick buildings." The National Trust for Historic Preservation asked that the historic legacy of a city and region not be held hostage to the narrow corporate preferences of a single commercial enterprise. But ConAgra refused to reconsider. The Jobbers Canyon district was adjacent to another historic district, "The Old Market," which has proved to be an important center of cultural, tourist, and residential development in Omaha.
The company was also caught spraying water on its grain so that it would weigh more. Not a nice bunch.
Any worker knows that OSHA is a joke really, a few people for millions of jobsites. And these corporations can pay these fines, it won't stop them killing workers and destroying the environment in their quest for profits. It is the organized workers that can best determine how safe an operation can be. And true safety will not be practiced in the workplace as long as huge global giants like ConAgra and the production of food, energy and all of society's major needs are in private hands and production set in to motion for profit.
As I have written before on this blog, the capitalist class have the public sector in their sights. There are many reasons for this but the bottom line is profit. The public sector is somewhat less competitive with better benefits and pension plans. Wages tend to be higher and the work environment more humane and regulated. Imagine how safer the process of production would be if it was controlled and managed by the workers themselves. I think these few statistics confirm this. Compare the total fatalities for 2006 with the private sector fatalities of that year; the free market is nasty alright.
Here are some statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
5,703 Fatal work injuries in the United States in 2006
5,734 Fatal work injuries in 2005
5,202 Fatal work injuries in private industry in 2006
447 Fatal work injuries in manufacturing in 2006
It is no wonder that these deaths, workplace terrorism, get very little media attention except in extreme cases like the above. al Queda won't seem so dangerous anymore and a different group of terrorists will be blamed----and they're easier to find, Wall Street and Washington DC
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