West fertilizer plant hit with 24 safety violations, $118,300 in fines

1) http://www.statesman.com/news/news/west-fertilizer-plant-hit-with-24-safety-violation/nbLRJ/ 

2) Legal 

3) Local Level 

4) The article evaluates the fertilizer plant explosion in West, TX and the $118,000 in fines the company owes to OSHA. Although, the Mayor of West says safety violations were ignored by OSHA because they had not inspected the facility in 20 years, which may be the leading cause to the town’s tragic event. 

5) These effects of these findings will change the way OSHA operates in the future with their attention to detail when doing inspection, will affect OSHA directly, and will obviously affect the community in West, Texas as they continue to recover from the disaster that occurred in April, and the plant itself. 

6) In my opinion there seems to be a lot of key people involved in the city, the company, and OSHA that either do not have their facts straight, or just don't know what they are talking about at all. The Fertilizer plant disagrees with OSHA's list of violations, some of which include 

The 24 “serious” violations OSHA says it found at West Fertilizer Co. include:

• Storage buildings without adequate ventilation.
• Walls that weren’t fire-resistant as required.
• An ammonium nitrate storage structure built with combustible material.
• Flammable materials, such as paper seed bags and wooden pallets, stored in the same building as ammonium nitrate.
• Lack of suitable water supplies or fire hydrants nearby.
• Failure to pressure test hoses used with anhydrous ammonia.
• Inadequate portable fire extinguishers.
• Unprotected light bulb sockets hanging freely above dry fertilizer bins.
• Failure to develop an emergency response plan.......

These all seem to be pretty vital to the safety of the plant and almost impossible to be made up violations by OSHA. At the same time, West's Mayor blamed OSHA for failing to inspect the plant since 1980! If this truly is the case, OSHA should have some serious consequences for it's failure to ensure safety for the workers of the Plant and town. It's hard to know who is right and who is wrong in this situations with so many different versions of what happened and why it happened in the first place. It's a little scary to thing that OSHA would go so long without inspecting a company that handles so many chemicals.