VIC: Esso cut back maintenance before fatal fire

AAP General News (Australia)
12-16-1998
VIC: Esso cut back maintenance before fatal fire

EDS: NOTE LANGUAGE IN PARA 10



By Peter Barber

MELBOURNE, Dec 16 AAP - Esso reduced maintenance resources each year to its ageing Longford
plant, where a faulty piece of equipment exploded and killed two workers and cut gas to most
of Victoria, the Longford Royal Commission was told today.

The company also ignored or overlooked the serious risk that a pipeline connecting sections
of the plant could disable the entire facility if a fire broke out, the commissioners were
told today.

Royal Commission chairman Sir Daryl Dawson and commissioner Brian Brooks today heard
graphic testimony of the moments before and after the blast on September 25, which killed
maintenance supervisors John Lowery and Peter Wilson.

Fearing for his life, maintenance fitter Shane Vandersteen left the scene of his
co-workers death less than two minutes before the fatal blast.

Mr Vandersteen was called to help the two men repair a faulty heat exchanger in nearby gas
plant one, which was frosted with ice and leaking oil from both ends.

He said he and Mr Lowery believed the exchanger should have been shut down.

"I was going on my gut feeling that it was a place that I would rather not be," Mr
Vandersteen said in a statement to the commission.

"There was too many things which appeared to be not under control...."

He said there were "too many chiefs" and no one seemed to know who was in charge.

He told Mr Lowery: "Fuck this - Im out of here."

Less than two minutes after he and a co-worker fled the scene he heard the first of two
explosions.

The blast actually came from the rupture of a nearby exchanger, GP905, which killed Mr
Lowery and the most senior supervisor at the plant that day, Peter Wilson.

Mr Vandersteen said Longfords emergency procedures broke down as fire swept through gas
plant one, with 90 per cent of staff evacuating, leaving insufficient personnel for
firefighting.

"All of us in the fire shed were waiting for instructions but none came," he said.

There was silence on the plants radio and nobody knew what was happening.

Mr Vandersteen said when he began with Esso in 1988 there were four maintenance supervisors
at both the crude and gas plants and there was now one in each.

There was now less money available to do repairs, and maintenance was done only on faulty
equipment.

"Each year (Esso) was reducing the amount of money available for maintenance," he said.

Counsel assisting the royal commission James Judd, QC, said Esso had been put on notice of
the dangers of ice on equipment by a "cold temperature incident" more than three weeks before
the fatal blast.

He also said the company had taken a "considerable and identifiable design risk" by
choosing to run piping from gas plant one through gas plants two and three.

The company had "calculated and accepted or overlooked" the risk that a fire in gas plant
one could disable the rest of the facility, as happened on September 25, he said.

"The fact that the Longford plant was, at the time this design decision was made, virtually
the only source of natural gas supply to Victoria made this risk an even more serious one," Mr
Judd said.

Esso was also accused today of trying to conceal the results of its own internal
investigation into the incident beneath legal privilege.

Counsel for the Insurance Council of Australia Ross Gillies, QC, said the companys
investigation was coordinated by its lawyers, Middletons Moore and Bevins, in a bid to hide
the truth beneath lawyer/client confidentiality.

"I suggest the process is for Esso to be as obstructive and as predisposed to concealment
as possible," Mr Gillies said.

Esso chairman and managing director Robert Olsen denied the charge, saying lawyers were
engaged to coordinate the companys involvement with the royal commission and protect it from
a class action which has been launched against it.

He said Esso began its own internal probe into the blast but concluded that the most
appropriate course was to give its full assistance to the royal commission in investigating
the facts of the disaster.

The royal commission continues tomorrow.

AAP pjb/er/jnb/de

KEYWORD: GAS NIGHTLEAD

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