Largely invisible tank cleaning industry awash in risk
US & World // News
By Ingrid Lobet, Houston Chronicle May 14, 2014 Updated: May 15, 2014 12:08 a.m.
1of3Rail tank car cleaners enter through hatches like this one, which shows a sheen of olefin sulfide, like the residue in the car in which David Godines died.Photo: OSHA
2of3A truck drives by a container-cleaning business in Channelview, east of Houston, as neighbors celebrate a child's birthday across the street.Photo: Mayra Beltran, Houston Chronicle
3of3 Steam pours from a tank trailer at a wash site in Alabama. A sign indicates the truck held styrene monomer, a plastics component. Photo: Mayra Beltran, Houston Chronicle
Hours before first light, David Godines slipped out of the house and headed to work at a railyard near the Houston Ship Channel, where he played his bit part in the global petrochemicals trade.
He cleaned the insides of rail tanker cars.
The cleaners dragged thick drain lines to the tankers' bellies and dropped in steam hoses to loosen hardened gunk that the old-timers called "clabber." Sometimes, they climbed inside.
Godines and his crew often were hazy about what chemicals the cars carried — a daily wash list used only a Lubrizol Corp. proprietary code in the column headed "last contained."
What they did know was this: If small gas monitors they wore on their clothes went off, the vapors seeping from the cars could be toxic.
At daybreak, a much louder alarm startled the yard. A voice echoed across the tracks, "Man down on east-west." Everyone ran to the tank car at East-11. But they had to step back, their gas monitors buzzing.
"The fumes was so strong," James Ashford Sr., an employee at Austin Industrial Specialty Services, the firm that cleaned cars for Lubrizol, recalled in a deposition.
View an interactive map of tank cleaning facilities
Godines lay at the bottom of the tanker.
If rivers, rails and roads are the arteries of America's surging petrochemicals industry, tank and barge cleaners are its kidneys, purifying containers so they can return to refineries and to energy and chemical companies across the nation to be refilled.
But government health and safety experts don't know much about these cleaners, how many there are or where they're located, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found.
OSHA doesn't even know how many tank cleaning establishments it has inspected, in part because no standard industry code is used by the U.S. Labor Department for tracking and inspecting them.
"We have no way to find companies that do tank washing," said Robert McDonough, a compliance officer for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Officials can't count how many tank and barge cleaners have lost their lives on the job, or how many suffer from nerve damage or cancer related to work-related chemical exposure.
"It's alarming it is so under the radar," said Celeste Monforton, who lectures at the School of Public Health & Health Services at George Washington University and worked at OSHA. "You are talking about extremely toxic environments. Many of those chemicals have health effects that workers may not experience until 10 to 20 years down the line."
The Chronicle identified 373 tank and barge cleaning sites using trade publications, news reports, OSHA records and interviews. There could be many more.
Owners of the sites range from individual family-owned facilities like Rainbow Transport Tank Cleaners in Carson, Calif., to Quala, the Florida-headquartered chain of 51 mostly truck wash facilities in 22 states.
They stretch across the country, concentrated in Texas and Louisiana, heart of the nation's petrochemical industry. The epicenter: Harris County.
Only a third of the 373 sites have been inspected by OSHA in the past 10 years, the Chronicle determined by searching OSHA inspection reports through the end of 2013.
At those sites OSHA has inspected, the agency found an average of nine dangerous conditions, the records showed. Only a small number had no violations. The most common were allowing cleaners to work without correct breathing protection, and allowing them to enter spaces that could be lethally oxygen-deficient.
The Chronicle also used OSHA records, along with news reports, to develop a workplace death toll for this largely hidden industry: 51 direct on-site deaths over the past 15 years, a toll that does not count people who died from work-related disease that only become apparent days, weeks, months or years later. There could be more.
"It is extremely, extremely hazardous work," says Alan McMillan, a former acting assistant secretary at OSHA and former chief executive officer of the National Safety Council.
Working blind
David Godines' wife, Amy, and their two children still were sleeping when he left for work at the railyard. His life was all about them now.
His childhood friend, Pedro Davila, had remarked on the change, thanking Amy.
"You helped my boy out," he said. "You made him into a man."
In a Halloween photo, Godines is fitting his son's tiny toes into a skeleton costume. In another, his daughter is leaning up against her dad, both napping peacefully in the cab of a pickup. So much of that role yet to play.
But Godines would never come home from work.
When a Lubrizol employee dropped a meter into the railcar where Godines lay after the alarm had sounded that morning, it registered "overload," an OSHA inspection report says.
Godines died inside the railcar, where hydrogen sulfide gas was so concentrated that the cells in his lungs stopped exchanging air. Yet experts said his brain would have been alive for a little while, and he would have asphyxiated, sentient.
A wrongful death action brought by Godines' widow raised questions about whether employees recognized the proprietary codes Lubrizol used instead of names to identify chemicals.
OSHA investigators had determined they weren't given the actual names of the chemicals they handled. Workers' knowledge of the chemicals they handle is considered fundamental to industry safety.
In the lawsuit, Godines' co-worker Terry Tyrone Wilson was able to identify some of the codes.
"That's a 30-minute wash," he said when quizzed about one, and described another as "a light one."
But he couldn't list their basic chemical characteristics.
Austin Industrial and Lubrizol employees later testified in the wrongful death action that they didn't know if key air tests were regularly performed.
Federal rules require that a qualified person with a proper meter test each container to make sure oxygen is sufficient, and it's safe to enter.
But at the yard where Godines worked, the foremen employed a relaxed system where workers routinely signed each other's names on these entry permits. On the day of Godines' fatal accident, someone else had signed his name.
Safety procedures changed at the plant after David Godines died.
Lubrizol and Austin Industrial reached a monetary settlement with Amy Godines.
Austin Industrial stressed that it's an employee-owned company for which safety is the pre-eminent value.
"We regret this unfortunate incident and our thoughts and prayers remain with the Godines family," the company said in a statement. "We continue to mandate strict safety procedures and rigorous training programs throughout our company operations."
Lubrizol said it is "absolutely committed to the safety and protection of all employees and external partners who work at our facilities. We regret that this incident occurred at one of our facilities."
The company said it remains dedicated to continuous and rigorous improvement in environmental, health, safety and security.
A couple of weeks before Godines' 2011 death, a little way south at Enterprise Products Transportation in Freeport, another young father and tank truck cleaner opened a truck he reportedly believed contained the remains of a safe product.
Instead, Chris Shirley was exposed to a mixture of "9 or more chemicals," including "oxirane, amine, oxide, formaldehyde and phthalate" OSHA records indicate. He was overcome by the vapors and slid into the belly of the tanker. He was not quite dead when retrieved, but died at the hospital.
Other casualties track the spread of the American oil patch. In North Dakota last year, two men barely out of high school were cleaning the inside of a crude oil tank truck for the company Plains Trucking.
Federal records show Trevor Davis, 19, lowered his light — not the spark-safe kind that's required — into the tanker to see his work. It blew up. The force blasted a hole through the ceiling. Davis was lifeless when found. His 20-year-old buddy suffered a concussion and head lacerations in the blast.
George Erickson, a seasoned gasoline barge cleaner on the Mobile River in Alabama, had pumped the sludge from the bottom of a long, low tanker barge that carried thousands of gallons of combustible liquid in April 2013.
Vapors rose from the sludge and wafted through the vessel's vents into the wet, spring air. Erickson told OSHA that his employer, Oil Recovery Co., did not have an onshore system for sucking up the flammable vapors. Fans were supposed to disperse the fumes. But the blowers failed, government records show, and vapors settled on the surface of the river.
A towboat, Safety Runner, pulled alongside the barge about 9 p.m. Within seconds, the vapor sucked into the tug engine's intake. A fireball ripped through the barge and set Erickson on fire. He survived, disfigured, and now struggles to recover with his wife and two children.
A deficient method
These accidents help underscore a common theme: The federal government relies on a deficient method to track and inspect a dangerous industry. Hospitals have an industry code, 622110. Karate camps have an industry code, 611620. It is the way workplace safety records are filed and retrieved in the United States.
But tank and barge wash operations are spread across a remarkable array of industry codes, the Chronicle has found. This is a main reason why OSHA doesn't know where they operate. And it could be why it has inspected only a third of the 373 in the list of tank and barge cleaning sites assembled by the newspaper.
The U.S. Coast Guard knows the location of barge cleaners, but their health and safety inspections are limited.
The sites that OSHA did inspect over the past decade fell into 40 different standard industry classification codes. No individual code was good for more than a sixth of the facilities.
It's logical that no single code would be apt for these varied businesses. The industry spans water, rail and highway. Companies usually choose the code that best fits their primary business, whereas tank and barge cleaning often is a mere sideline of much larger transport businesses. Shipyards or rail yards primarily manufacture or repair cars, not clean them. And companies change over time, even as their codes — which often reflect their initial activity — stay the same.
Still, the lack of a primary industry code haunts the hunt for these dangerous work sites and obscures this little-known, hazardous occupation.
"One of the things we do a really poor job of is collecting data," said Dean Wingo, who retired recently as assistant administrator for the OSHA region that includes Texas.
Largely unmonitored, tank cleaning is a growing industry. Chemical manufacturing is in a major expansion, thanks to abundant natural gas, from which many chemicals are made. Some of this chemical commerce courses through pipelines. But much goes by barge, by rail and by truck.
In 2012, four times as much petroleum traveled in railcars as the year before. Barge traffic is up substantially.
Federal and local safety and health experts who spoke with the Chronicle sometimes were unfamiliar with the conditions that cleaners say they habitually encounter, or with the chemicals they handle.
OSHA officials could not provide even a partial list of which tank cleaning establishments have been inspected for compliance with such issues as workers having the right breathing masks and training.
Workers at many of the cleaning sites identified by the Chronicle handle substances that the Environmental Protection Agency categorizes as "hazardous waste."
In cleaning the cars, about a third of those 373 sites "generated" 23 million pounds of hazardous waste a year, the most recent EPA report shows. Yet even the sites that handle the most hazardous waste can go uninspected, the Chronicle found.
Kentucky accident
On Feb. 7, a Kentucky father of three, Eric Young, 37, entered a tanker truck at QC of Kentucky Inc., in Calvert City. He fell unconscious. A co-worker went to help him, and he passed out, too. A third colleague called for help. But Young's life was over.
The truck had contained nitrogen, the coroner determined. Nitrogen often is used to keep already-washed equipment clean and dry. It's a well-known lethal hazard. Since workers can't see or smell it, and since their first oxygen-free breath can be fatal, there are OSHA rules requiring that every tanker be tested before anyone can go inside.
The president of the company, George Brown, said QC of Kentucky grieves with Young's family and is "evaluating what occurred to take the necessary steps to prevent this type of accident from happening."
"It was a real tragedy, and it's not the first time," said Randy Gray, who was an OSHA compliance officer in Kentucky for a quarter-century and now runs a safety consulting company.
"We've had this happen before," he said, referring to other industry accidents.
Ingrid.Lobet@chron.com
Police: Illinois girl, 3, fell from window, died from cold
Alert: Lottery: Jackpot-winning Powerball ticket worth $731.1 million sold at...
By ZEKE MILLER and AAMER MADHANI, Associated Press
Elizabeth Low and Alex Longley, Bloomberg
Oil drops on fears of demand loss in large countries