Shanghai Scrap

As noted by Shanghaiist, a recent fatal explosion at a gas station in Pudong is garnering international attention. No surprise, the international coverage doesn’t mention a cause because – let’s face it – no Shanghai bureaucrat wants to be the one pinning responsibility on China National Petroleum Corporation, the state-owned oil monopoly that happens to own the destroyed station. So the blame game is left to the folks at Xinhua who, predictably, take the path of least resistance and blame those who can’t retaliate:

Improper work practices caused Saturday’s blast at a Shanghai gas station that claimed four lives …

And who did the work? A thirty-year-old from Anhui, and a forty-six-year-old from Jiangsu. As it happens, the only local entity involved in this blast is the company hired to do the maintenance:

The two workers were employees of the Shanghai Pacific Gas Co.,Ltd. and the municipal administration of work safety is trying to determine if they received proper training for maintenance work.

In other words, the “municipal administration of work” is looking to blame this accident on somebody other than China National Petroleum Corporation, which owns the exploded tank. Which is ridiculous, because responsibility for this accident belongs – squarely – to China National Petroleum Corporation – a conclusion easily drawn from Xinhua’s hand-waving:

Operations at the gas station, an outlet of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) located at No. 909, Third Pudong Roadin Puding New District, had been suspended since Nov. 11 for a safety inspection. The underground gas tanks needed to be pressurized to carry out the inspection, said an official with the municipal department of publicity. The official, who declined to give his name, said there had been residual gas in the tanks, leading to the explosion at 7:50 a.m. Saturday.

Now, if I’m the Municipal Administration of Work, the first question that I want answered is this one: “Did anybody tell the maintenance company that there was residual gas in the tanks?” [even the most dimwitted maintenance company knows to evacuate fuel tanks before working on them] Followed by: “Were the tanks at the station approved for use as pressurized vessels?” That is to say, could they be evacuated using pressurization (standard industry practice)? Of course, both of those questions imply that there are faults in the state-owned station’s design and operating procedures (worker errors are always enabled by design flaws), which is why those questions won’t be asked. It’s easier to blame the accident on a privately-owned contractor than to admit state-owned negligence.
Finally, and perhaps most important, it would behoove the municipal authorities to ask the station’s owners whether or not they had checked the qualifications of the maintenance company. That is, had the company done this sort of work in the past? Were they certified (acknowledging that “certification” procedures are often no more than a red envelope stuffed with cash passed beneath a table)? If the question is ‘no’ to either of these questions, then the station’s owners are, again, negligent.

Alas, there’s nothing new here. Last August, when one of the world’s most technologically advanced (partly state-owned) aluminum plants exploded in Shandong, the Shandong safety authorities – with the help of the local media – were quick to blame it on workers. Days later, the national authorities stepped in and blamed the unprecedented explosion on a faulty plant design … and then nothing was heard of the event again [the Xinhua story is no longer available; interfax has a summary]. I blogged about that incident here and here, and to this day, (three months later!), I still receive emails from aluminum industry officials – worldwide – who want to know if anybody has yet released a report on the nature of the design flaw. To which I answer: Not yet, and probably never, unless it can be definitively proven that the accident was the fault of a worker.