HOUSTON (AFX) - For Eva Rowe, refusing to resolve her lawsuit against BP PLC for the deaths of her parents in last year's deadly Texas City refinery explosion has not been about getting a better settlement offer.
'Because if I take their money and go away, I will not be able to make a difference. My parents deaths will be in vain,' she said. 'I hope to accomplish (something) so that everybody and their families can work in refineries and be safer.'
Rowe's civil lawsuit is the only remaining one involving fatalities from the March 2005 blast that killed 15 people and injured more than 170 others. The rest have been settled out of court.
Jury selection in the case was set to begin Thursday in Galveston, with the trial expected to last at least a month.
Brent Coon, Rowe's attorney, said the trial will highlight how a history of budget cuts, a lack of training and resources and willful ignorance of growing problems at the facility by upper management all combined to cause the accident.
Last week, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, one of several agencies probing the blast, said internal BP documents show management knew about maintenance, spending and infrastructure problems well before the accident.
'BP came out and made a conscious decision to defer maintenance at the facility, made a decision to make massive budget cuts,' Coon said. 'As a result of that, what happened out there was inevitable.'
Neil Chapman, a spokesman for the London-based oil company, said BP has accepted responsibility for the accident.
'We know we cannot undo the harm caused by this tragedy,' he said. 'All we can do is focus on the future, to learn the lessons from it and make all our operations as safe as we can as a result.'
Rowe, 22, said she hopes to educate the public about the accident and focus attention on changes needed to prevent others from happening.
'BP took my life away so I tried to make something better out of it to honor my parents. They were all I had,' she said.
Her parents, James and Linda Rowe, were from the rural town of Hornbeck, La., located near the Texas-Louisiana border about 126 miles northeast of Beaumont.
The couple worked as contract employees at the plant. James Rowe, 48, had worked there about a year while Linda Rowe, 47, had been there a few months. James Rowe worked at refineries the previous six years, while his wife had been a teacher's aide.
The explosion at the plant, located about 40 miles southeast of Houston, occurred after a piece of equipment called a blowdown drum overfilled with highly flammable liquid hydrocarbons.
The excess liquid and vapor hydrocarbons were then vented from the drum and ignited as the isomerization unit -- a device that boosts the octane in gasoline -- started up. Alarms and gauges that were supposed to warn of the overfilled equipment failed to operate properly.
All 15 deaths happened in the two trailers closest to the blast site. CSB investigators determined the trailers were too close to the unit.
In its initial report last October, the CSB concluded the isomerization unit had prior problems and was not connected to a flare system that would burn off vapor and prevent or minimize the accident.
The report also found that BP fostered bad management at the plant. Last week, the CSB urged the petroleum industry and federal regulators to eliminate blowdown drums from all U.S. refineries. The CSB's final report won't be issued until at least March.
BP, one of the world's largest oil companies, has said it's committed more than $1 billion over the next five years to upgrade and maintain the Texas City plant.
Chapman said BP has made vast improvements at the refinery, including new and enhanced training and maintenance programs, removing more than 200 temporary structures, moving hundreds of employees and contractors offsite and requiring supervisors to be present for all startups, shutdowns and other critical operations.
The oil company also said it is isolating or removing all blowdown stacks that handle light hydrocarbon liquids like gasoline.
BP also named a panel headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III to investigate safety and management oversight at its U.S. plants. The group is set to release its findings at the end of the month.
Chapman said senior management was aware of concerns about safety issues at the plant.
'Unfortunately, the breadth and depth of issues was not apparent to senior management until after the tragic accident,' he said.
BP said its investigation did not identify staffing levels, budget cuts or maintenance and condition of the blowdown drum and related equipment as critical factors in the accident.
Since the blast, BP has dealt with a variety of problems at its U.S. facilities, including pipeline corrosion that forced production declines at its Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska and equipment failure at a production platform under construction in the Gulf of Mexico.
BP has already settled hundreds of lawsuits related to the blast and has put aside $1.6 billion to resolve legal disputes. That is the same amount Rowe's attorneys are asking for in damages.
Coon said he is confident of winning the case.
Lonny Hoffman, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said Rowe's attorneys 'are going to have to be pretty specific in (proving) the ways in which something the company did or didn't do with regard to safety was a contributing factor in the explosion.'
Coon said a victory in the civil lawsuit won't guarantee that safety requests his client has sought from BP, such as permanently removing all trailers and blowdown drums from the plant, will be implemented. But the trial publicity hopefully will 'embarrass' BP into making changes and prompt lawmakers to pass refinery safety legislation.
'Financial settlement alone does not give (Eva Rowe) closure,' Coon said. 'She needs closure and the closure is that her parents didn't die in vain. And that means something has to be done so that she can sleep at night knowing that she has made a change that does reduce the risk to other people that work at these plants.'
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