Fatal sugar refinery blast was preventable, US panel says

The US Chemical Safety Board, which investigates industrial accidents, said that it found written warnings of explosive dust hazards in refinery memos from the 1960s and that the deaths probably could have been prevented by routine housekeeping. The agency said near-misses over the years from small fires also failed to persuade corporate managers to take the threat seriously inside the nation’s second-largest sugar refinery, located a few miles west of Savannah.

“The explosion at Imperial Sugar was entirely preventable, and the deaths and injuries that occurred here in February 2008 should not have happened,’’ John Bresland, the board’s chairman, said at a news conference.

The board doesn’t issue fines or sanctions. Its findings are used to make safety recommendations to policy makers and industry officials. But the findings could become a factor in more than 30 civil lawsuits filed by injured employees and relatives of workers killed in the blast.

The Feb. 7, 2008, disaster killed 14 workers and injured 36.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration last year cited Imperial Sugar for 211 workplace safety violations at its refineries in Georgia and Gramercy, La.

It recommended $8.7 million in fines against the company - the third-highest penalty in the agency’s history. The company is contesting the fines. No criminal charges have been filed.

The report concluded that the initial blast ignited inside a conveyor belt that carried sugar from the refinery’s silos to a vast packaging plant where workers bagged sugar under the Dixie Crystals brand.

The 80-foot conveyor had been enclosed in a steel cover a year earlier to prevent contamination, but it also trapped sugar dust in dangerous concentrations. The damage was too severe to determine the exact cause, but investigators said an overheated bearing in the steel conveyor probably ignited the dust.