I don’t know about you, but I favor there being fewer unplanned massive explosions.
A deadly explosion that rocked northwest Houston in January 2020 could have been prevented with better planning and safety training, the federal agency responsible for investigating chemical incidents said in a new report released this week.
The Watson Grinding and Manufacturing explosion on Jan. 24, 2020, killed three people and damaged hundreds of homes in northwest Houston.
A final investigation report from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board found that the explosion was caused by the accidental release of propylene, a flammable vapor, from a “degraded and poorly crimped” hose.
The gas filled the building overnight and likely ignited when an employee came into the warehouse and turned on a light, according to the report released Thursday.
But large parts of the 56-page report focused on the company’s failure to train employees or to ensure workplace safety.
“Watson Grinding did not have an effective program in place to assess potential hazards in its propylene process and did not have a mechanical integrity program or written operating procedures,” Chemical Safety Board Chairman Steve Owens said in a statement. “This tragic incident was made even worse due to the lack of emergency response training for employees at the facility. Three lives were lost, and the surrounding community was put at risk as a result.”
Jon Watson, the CEO of the now-closed company, could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon. Lawyers representing Watson and his company in civil lawsuits did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
More than 2,000 people from the working-class neighborhood of Westbranch claimed to be harmed by the explosion. Two workers were killed at the warehouse, and another man died after his home’s ceiling collapsed on him.
The blast shifted homes off their foundations, and residents in the months that followed struggled to get compensation from the company.
Investigators concluded that employees didn’t take safeguards to prevent a gas leak, such as turning off a manual shutoff valve, and had an inoperative automated gas detection alarm and gas shutoff system, according to the report.
Watson Grinding didn’t have plans on what to do in response to a gas leak and didn’t train its employees to recognize a leak. On the day of the explosion, the company failed to contact emergency responders for help, the report said.
“Had Watson Grinding developed and implemented an effective process safety management program to identify and control hazards, the incident could have been prevented,” the report said.
See here, here, and here for some background. You can find a copy of that report here. As I noted before, I was awake at the time of the explosion, which I could hear from inside my house, which according to Google Maps is about eleven miles away. I can only imagine what it was like closer to the blast. The report has some recommendations, but ultimately preventing disasters like this is about enforcement, which necessarily means inspections. That’s going to cost a lot of money and require a lot of people, and I just don’t see that happening. What we have instead is civil lawsuits and hope. Good luck with that.
You can see a bunch of photos of the devastation, which included a lot of people’s homes, here. Down a ways in that story, one of the photo captions says “Neighbors of the Watson Grinding and Manufacturing plant, which exploded last week, said they didn’t know they were living next to a dangerous facility, let alone one that could knock their homes off their foundations.” Think about that for a minute. The Trib has more.
I lived in that neighborhood for 8 years and can vouch that I never knew there was anything that dangerous that close, either. Of course we knew there was light industrial a little down Clay, but the streets in the neighborhood don’t directly connect (I don’t think I ever had a reason to drive down Steffani Lane) and it’s not directly on Gessner either, so you forget about it if it’s not always in your face and you don’t think about the materials “light industrial” can work with.
I sold in June 2019 and definitely feel bad for the people I sold it to. My house wasn’t right next to the blast, but was about two blocks away as the crow flies, and I know the windows were blown out, at the very least. I remember sitting at work watching the live footage and not getting much done because of being in shock; that could have happened even a few months earlier and I could have woken up with my ceiling fan lying next to me and glass at my feet.
It’s not perfect (it’s a bit vague on details, for one), but I did find a county website that you can look up some potential hazards around you – https://www.harriscountytx.gov/CRK