CSB Report on Xcel Cabin Creek Fire 2

[sshep]

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board issued its final report and video description of a 2Oct2007 underground fire that killed 5 people at the Xcel Cabin Creek hydroelectric facility.

http://www.csb.gov/investigations/detail.aspx?SID=9

While the investigation and video are quite educational; you will also find on the CSB site a letter to Xcel Energy Inc CEO Richard C. Kelly. The letter basically informs Xcel that considerable taxpayer expense and time was wasted because Xcel failed to cooperate with the CSB investigation, requiring intervention of the U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Colorado to compell cooperation in the investigation. Xcel also tried to block the publication of the CSB final report. The letter claims that this is the first time their experience that a company has attempted to thwart to this degree a CSB investigation of a safety incident.

I made this post out of total disgust for any corporate executive that thumbs his nose at puplic and employee safety. Hopefully such clowns are rare, but I am afraid they are more common than we like to think. My opinion is that any company that refuses to cooperate in a US government authorized safety investigation of multiple fatalities has no right to operate.

best wishes,
Sean Shepherd

 

[MJCronin]

Kudos to you shep !!!

These clowns, unfortunately are not rare.

Killing people and then using the law for cover is in vogue these days.

MBA schools try to teach ethics.......yet none of it seems to stick.

IMHO, the only solution is to turn over the rock and publish the names of all the vermin that purposfully block the truth

 

[rmw]

Interesting to find this in a Chemical Plant forum as it occurred in a Utility Power Plant, but none the less, the lessons learned are poignant. In my career, I have worked through the era of virtually no safety rules (hard hats were thought to be just about enough) to safety rules out the wazoo.

Frankly I prefer the latter, as some of the stuff we did innocently enough - we just weren't trained any better - really scares me now that I am trained and aware.

Management trying to thwart the investigation, however, is crimminal in and of itself, regardless of what the facts of the occurance were.

I am glad to see some light of day shed on this.

And, I will probably go hug (euphamistically speaking) our Safety Director on Monday morning. The life he saves might be mine. Once when I was on an outage at a Paper Mill and a worker was killed when he came into contact with an energized buss, another worker comment 'these are good jobs, but they aren't worth dying over'. Too bad Xcel didn't have such a view for those 5 poor unfortunate painters.

rmw

 

[MikeHalloran]

The atmosphere in the penstock before the incident made it equivalent to a chemical plant. ... actually, much worse than any chemical plant would allow to persist.

The CSB report makes it clear that RPI's employees were basically dead men when Xcel's project manager and plant manager decided to ignore their own company's selection rules and award the contract to a company with a demonstrably dismal safety record.

The common unspoken thread in recent high visibility disasters, and one that I have seen in countless outfits before, is that contract personnel are widely regarded as expendable. Hence the contractor is left to provide his own oversight, with predictable results.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA