Our Blog

An Ohio grand jury has indicted a southwest Ohio company, United Oil Recovery Services Inc. and its environmental health and safety manager, with involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, criminal endangering and environmental violations in the 2008 death of a treatment plant worker who authorities say was overcome by toxic gas. The company president and plant manager and three officials are also charged with endangering worker safety, report say.. Reports say sodium hydrosulfide, used to speed up a wastewater treatment process at…

A Texas jury awarded $82.5 million in damages to the family of a man who died in a 2007 explosion at Houston-based Hanover Compressions L.P., a natural gas processing plant in Hood County. The company, which has since been renamed Exterran Energy Solutions L.P., constructed, engineered and installed the natural gas processing plant that the jury said was grossly negligent in the death of 27-year-old Joshua Wade Petrie, an employee of Fort Worth, Texas-based Quicksilver. Gas workers have enough risks…

A crew member of a Qatargas time-chartered vessel died from injuries he sustained while boarding a service launch from the ship on which he had been working.  The worker, who had just completed his tour of duty and was leaving the ship to return home, was moving from the ship to a launch to take him ashore. The ship’s gangway was rigged so that the crew would have to jump from the gangway to the second ship’s deck, a distance…

After a cloud of toxic gas escaped from a factory, a worker who came in contact with the gas died, reports say. The worker, Paul Doyley, from Immingham, near London, was fatally injured when titanium tetrachloride fumes escaped from the Cristal Global site earlier this year. Although he received treatment for chemical burns and inhalation of toxic fumes in a specialist burns unit at Pinderfields General Hospital in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, Doyley, who was 48 and had been with the…

Steven Lewenden, 34, was feeding paper into a machine when he was pulled in and trapped on a reeling drum. Eventually freed from the equipment by paramedics and taken to hospital, damage to Lewenden’s arm was so severe that doctors had to amputate his limb at the elbow. The accident happened at the closure-threatened International Paper mill in Inverurie, Aberdeenshire. The firm and the Health and Safety Executive have launched inquiries into Tuesday’s accident, and company spokesman reportedly said that…