I thought this article was particularly interesting after the picric
acid journalism that was discussed here. It's written from a
journalist's perspective about how unusual the effort to write about
hazardous materials can be. The thing that causes me the most concern
is how the mainstream perspective seems to be that "employees took
their chances every day when they punched the clock."
- Ralph
When Beats Collide
By Lynn J. Cook
Virtually every story can be boiled down to one thing: money. who has
it? Who doesnít? Whoís successfully lobbying for it? Whoís
disenfranchised and deserves more of it? Economics is at the heart of
most stories worth reporting, and yet it is the one subject
journalists, collectively, are rarely expected to understand with any
depth.
In journalism school, professors admonish us to ìfollow the money,î
but that adage seems tailored only for obvious stories about campaign
funding or sweetheart zoning deals. In my time as a reporter for The
Houston Chronicle, my paperís pages have been filled with features on
topics that, at first blush, donít necessarily appear to be economic
in nature. Hurricane Katrina evacuees and skyrocketing crime. The
rise of the Minute Men and border patrol issues. The war in Iraq and
how national security is tied to oil. As a profession, weíre great at
politics and culture wars so we approach a lot of news from those
angles. Itís an easier approach, but it ignores the fact that
politics and culture are inextricably linked with economics. When I
look at newspapers with a critical eye, I am often left wondering,
ìWhereís the money?î Even the most masterly narratives can fall flat
when economic issues are conspicuously absent or, worse, given
superficial treatment.
I saw just how much more comprehensive coverage can be when metro
reporters and business writers collaborated two years ago after an
explosion ripped through BPís Texas City refinery, the nationís third
largest, killing fifteen people and injuring 170.
In the moments after the blast, editors treated the story as a
standard industrial catastrophe. Reporters rushed to the scene and to
local hospitals to gather information on the blaze, the casualties,
and the possibility a toxic cloud would descend onto the community.
It didnít take long to realize, though, that Texas City would be a
much longer, more arduous reporting slog, requiring expertise in
everything from corporate finance to engineering to government
regulation. After the initial heartrending stories of courageous
workers trying to rescue their colleagues and broken families trying
to plan so many funerals, Chronicle reporters would have to get to
the bottom of what exactly went wrong and why. Was this truly an
accident, or just an accident waiting to happen?
I remember vividly the first editorial meeting of the Texas City
reporting team. George Haj, our deputy managing editor of news, said
metro and business reporters would work together on this story like
never before. It was a concept that had received a lot of lip service
in the newsroom but had never been put to the test on a grand scale.
From the start, I could see why the wall between sections had not
come down easily. Some reporters on the metro and business desks
looked at the world in fundamentally different ways.
Right off the bat, one metro reporter said labor union officials were
talking off the record, blaming the blow-up on shoddy work by
contract employees. That reporter thought the focus of all stories to
come was obviousóthe ills of outsourcing. To the business reporting
contingent at the table, that was stereotypical liberal media bias
writ large.
I noted that any contract work performed at the site would have had
to be inspected and signed off on by BPís own plant managers, who
were probably part of the union themselves, so that argument didnít
wash with me. This was BPís facility, run by BP engineers, creating
gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that would be sold and booked on BPís
balance sheet. Whatever happened was bound to be a more complicated
problem than the well-worn union-nonunion employee argument.
As it turned out, the fifteen dead were not BP employees but contract
workers. And they had absolutely nothing to do with the explosion,
which occurred in the isomerization unit, where octane-boosting
gasoline ingredients are created.
The workers were meeting in a mobile construction trailer, planning
maintenance for another part of the refinery, when the isom unit
blew. The ensuing fireball rolled over the flimsy trailer,
obliterating it. The explosion erupted while BP employees were
restarting the unit after a two-week tune-up. A series of mechanical
and monitoring problems caused a geyser of hot, flammable liquid and
vapor to back up inside a hundred-foot-tall ventilation stack that is
designed to relieve pressure inside the unit, and then overflow and
ignite.
Time and specialized reporting from both metro and business reporters
would reveal that BP had a history of using Band-Aid fixes to keep
Texas City running. Also, the maintenance workersí very presence on
the premises at the time of the blast was suspect. Restarting a
refining unit is one of the most dangerous times at a plant, and
other energy companies, such as ExxonMobil and Valero, have a policy
of sending all nonessential employees home during the process.
The trailer that was incinerated was just 121 feet away from the vent
stack that overflowed with boiling liquid, a violation of both BPís
internal policy of putting all trailers at least 350 feet from
hazardous equipment and similar industry guidelines. Emergency alarm
systems that could have warned workers to evacuate the area never
sounded.
Had either the city desk or the business desk been solely responsible
for uncovering what went wrong and how BPís corporate culture was to
blame, there would have been tremendous gaps in the Texas City story.
It took environmental and energy reporting as well as investigative
and legal legwork to ferret out a series of troubling flashpoints:
ï That particular unit had a long history of fires and explosions
going back more than a decade, including a fire less than twenty-four
hours before the blast. The unit was restarted anyway.
ï BP leads the nation in refinery fatalities since 1995, with ten
times as many deaths as recorded at ExxonMobil, BPís major U.S.-based
competitor.
ï The Occupational Safety and Health Administration told plant
managers in 1992, thirteen years before the explosion, that the
unitís ventilation stack was out of date and more modern equipment
was needed. It was never replaced.
That newsgathering was no small feat. The Texas City blast was the
nationís most serious industrial accident in fifteen years and the
first major one after 9/11. Government documents concerning the
plantís operational procedures and safety record that were once
easily accessed had vanished into the Homeland Security labyrinth.
Again and again, reporters hit brick walls trying to find what had
been considered basic public information a few short years ago. I was
told many documents had become classified so they could not fall into
terroristsí hands and put the countryís refining and chemical
complexes in harmís way.
It took a small army of journalists to smoke out all this
skulduggery. A business reporter, Anne Belli, was dogged in winning
the trust of plant insiders, the environmental reporter Dina
Cappiello found alternate routes to BP documents, and the
investigative reporter Lise Olsenís vast experience with filing
Freedom of Information Act requests helped pry loose damning numbers
about BP fatalities and the shockingly small fines BP had paid to
federal and state agencies as a result. In the case of one worker who
died at BPís Whiting, Indiana, refinery, osha fined the company only
$1,625.
There was a time when the Chronicle would not have covered such a
story so relentlessly. There used to be an attitude that refineries
were dangerous places to work and employees took their chances every
day when they punched the clock. But times have changed. Iíd like to
think the harsh glare of the spotlight the newspaper shined on events
at Texas City made a difference. This time around osha fined BP a
record $21.4 million after finding more than 300 violations. BP had
to set aside more than $1 billion to deal with legal fallout from the
explosion and invested even more to overhaul the Texas City plant.
Other costs to BP and its management are harder to quantify.
Chairman Lord John Browne announced in January that he would be
stepping down from the helm of BP this summer, eighteen months
earlier than he had planned. A few days later, a 300-page report from
an independent panel investigating BPóand run by former Secretary of
State James Baker IIIócriticized a ìrun until it breaksî mentality at
the company, which has ìa false sense of confidenceî about safety.
Since Texas City, there have been other collaborations between the
business and metro desks at the Chronicle, most notably during the
trials of Enronís top brass. A team of reporters produced a
continuously updated blog of all the courtroom actionódeciphering the
finer points of Enronís financial woesóin addition to traditional
daily and enterprise pieces.
Weíre too turf-conscious in journalism. We talk a good game about the
shrinking world and the interconnected nature of things, but have a
hard time applying that to our own newsrooms. Almost every story is,
in some way, a business story. By ignoring this fact in favor of some
artificial notion of ìthatís your beat, this is mine,î we do our
readers a disservice.
Lynn J. Cook, an energy writer for The Houston Chronicle , is one of
this yearís Knight Bagehot fellows, studying finance and economics at
the Columbia Business School.
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© 2005 Columbia Journalism Review at Columbia University's Graduate
School of Journalism
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