The Exploding Sugar Disaster

As members of the Senate agriculture committee spent Thursday decrying the fact that the Food and Drug Administration is apparently unable to keep us safe from diseased peanut butter, the anniversary of another disaster, also caused in part by toothless regulatory agencies, was fact approaching.

On Feb. 7 last year, an explosion at a Port Wentworth, Ga., plant owned by Imperial Sugar—just a few hundred miles from the "filthy" Blakely, Ga., plant where the latest salmonella outbreak started—killed 14 people and injured 40 more.

"Despite the outcry after the blast," writes Russ Bynum of the Associated Press, "the U.S. still lacks federal regulations requiring industrial plants to prevent the buildup of fine dust particles that can form explosive clouds in confined areas."

Regulators said sugar dust was to blame—a spark ignited it "like gunpowder."

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration said the company committed 211 safety violations at its two plants and proposed a fine of $8.7 million. That comes out to $621,428 per life lost.

OSHA regulates how dust has to be handled, but only in grain silos. Two years before the blast, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board declared that OSHA needs to apply those rules to other manufacturers, including food processors.  There have been 300 plant explosions caused by dust in the past 30 years, killing more than 120 workers.

But OSHA opposes applying the rules that govern grain dust to other kinds of plants. After the Georgia blast, the agency argued that "existing regulations on plant cleanliness and maintenance—which it used to cite Imperial Sugar—have been sufficient," Bynum reports.

The House tried to force OSHA to adopt the standard, but the Senate let the bill die in the face of former President Bush's promised veto. Democratic Rep. John Barrow of Georgia introduced a new bill this week. Such blasts are relatively rare, he said, but when they occur, they tend to be catastrophic. "It's like playing Russian roulette with a gun that has 1,000 chambers in it," he said.

Imperial has contested the OSHA fines even as it has spent $200 million to rebuild the parts of the plant that were destroyed. But on Saturday, the anniversary of the explosion, the company will dedicate a memorial park on the site.

"It's the right thing to do," said John Sheptor, Imperial's CEO. "There has been a lot of pain and suffering."

Sheptor, by the way, is the guy who allegedly told a company vice president, Graham Graham, that he was "excessively eager" in trying to fix problems at the plant prior to the explosion.

After the blast, Graham became a whistle-blower, testifying before a Senate panel in July that Imperial had hindered his efforts to improve conditions at the plant. He also filed an employment-discrimination lawsuit against the company, alleging that his cooperation with investigators led Imperial to keep him out of the management loop, especially when it came to the Georgia plant.

On Friday, though, the Savannah Morning News reported that Graham has made a "secret deal" with Imperial. He has quit his job and dropped his discrimination complaint, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.