Zero tolerance after the Tesoro disaster

NEWS of the terrifying explosion and fire at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes was at once alarming and foreign to most of the public, and frightening and familiar to industry insiders.

The lethal blast early Friday morning, which killed five workers and critically injured two others, was a grim revelation of on-the-job hazards unknown to vast segments of a paper-pushing, service economy.

Heartfelt condolences are extended to the families, co-workers and communities that mourn the loss of Daniel J. Aldridge, Matthew C. Bowen, Darrin J. Hoines, Kathryn Powell and Donna Van Dreumel. Two others, Matt Gumbel and Lew Janz, are at the UW Medicine Burn Center at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

Investigators are trying to understand what happened and answer basic questions about safety efforts within the petrochemical industry. Last year, the Anacortes refinery was written up by state inspectors for serious safety violations that posed a risk of death or injury to workers.

Seattle Times reporter Craig Welch laid out an industry history that found overall inspections so lax Congress got involved in 1992. New laws on the books did little to inspire remedial action among refineries or motivate federal inspections.

Perhaps the most disturbing insight in Welch's reporting is the broad awareness that accidents typically happen during or shortly after restarting equipment taken offline for repairs or maintenance: the lethal dynamic of several things going on at once. Such was the apparent template for disaster at the Tesoro plant.

The pattern in the industry, federal bureaucracy and public realm is to absorb each tragedy as an isolated personal and corporate loss, and move on. No lessons-learned oversight or penalty-based expectations of zero tolerance. Violations should not be lawyered away.

A change of attitude at several levels seems as elemental as any belated refinements to operating manuals and startup protocols.