Reno plant inspected 16 months before blast

Thursday, May 7, 1998 | 10:39 a.m.

RENO -- A company being fined a record $1 million for safety violations that killed four workers in a plant explosion today released new documents to show it had passed a state safety inspection 16 months before the accident.

The state Occupational Safety and Health Enforcement Bureau gave Sierra Chemical an average grade when it inspected the TNT-producing plant east of Sparks on Sept. 25, 1996.

An explosion at the plant on Jan. 6, 1998, killed four workers and injured six others. The Nevada Division of Industrial Relations served notice Wednesday it will seek to impose $997,000 in fines for 38 safety, training and procedure violations.

The division said Sierra Chemical knew about the violations and did nothing to correct them. But the company disputed this.

The company released a report made by the state in its last inspection before the explosion. The state inspector rated Sierra Chemical average in its safety and health training, its preventive actions, its communication to employees about the safety program, and its enforcement of safety rules.

But the industrial relations division said the investigation after the blast found the company failed in a number of areas to properly train its employees and was lax in observing other safety standards.

One complaint by the state said management failed to adequately communicate the safety measures necessary to their employees, many of whom did not speak English. "The communication barrier restricted the free flow of information from the production employees to top management and vice versa," it said.

Sixteen months before, the state found there was adequate communication to employees of the safety and health program.

Stan Kinder, owner of the plant, said, the state's allegations are unwarranted and unjust and served notice the company would appeal the fine.

Ron Swirczek, administrator of the industrial relations division, said there was little information at the plant about the chemicals used, operating guidelines and shutdown procedures. The division said the safety plan did not address hazards of the process of melting, mixing and drying explosives.

The report of the industrial relations division was presented to a task force created by Gov. Bob Miller to see what laws need to be changed to prevent a repeat of this type of an accident.

Investigators for the newly-created U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board reported last month there were four possible causes for the explosion and they all related to safety violations. The federal investigators found training was haphazard and the safety rules were printed in English, though most of the workers spoke only Spanish.

The federal inspectors said the night before the explosion a worker left 50-100 pounds of a volatile mixture of explosives in a mixing pot and the chemical harden. A hammer may have been used to break apart the explosive chunks and this could have caused a spark to ignite the explosion, according to the investigators.

The initial explosion occurred in a room where workers were filling cylinders called boosters with a molten cocktail of chemicals.