Three Dead After Gas Leak at Oil Refineries Haifa Plant, Israel Police Say
Three workers were killed when toxic gas leaked from the Haifa, Israel, processing plant of Oil Refineries Ltd., the country’s biggest refiner, Israeli police said today.
A fourth worker was in a serious condition, and at least three other people were treated for exposure to the gas, a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said in a telephone interview.
“The Oil Refineries facility has been closed down for seasonal maintenance during the past month,” the company said separately in an e-mailed statement. “As part of this operation the workers went up on the gas facility in appropriate dress, including masks. For reasons that are unclear at this moment, they were injured from gas inhalation.”
The investigation into the incident “will check possible technical failures, professional failures, and possible violations
Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said he had warned about the plant’s safety risks and called for it to be relocated.
“The facility is like a nuclear bomb and I have for years warned about its dangers,” Ben-Eliezer told Israel’s Army Radio. “If we arrive at the conclusion that the facility poses a threat to life, we will shut it.”
The investigation into the incident “will check possible technical failures, professional failures, and possible violations of laws or safety regulations,” the ministry’s Chief Labor Inspector Yoram Elazar said in a phone interview.
An Oil Refineries spokesman contacted by telephone declined to say whether the company planned to delay the plant’s reopening as a result of the fatal leak.
Maintenance
The company had been scheduled to complete a “turnaround” at its Haifa units in the first 10 days of December, Chief Executive Officer Yashar Ben-Mordechai told Bloomberg on Nov. 22. Work on units at the refinery, including a catalytic regeneration plant and hydrogen facility, started at the end of October.
The facility will be allowed to reopen only if it determined that it poses no danger to the workers or surrounding area,
The refinery has the capacity to process 197,000 barrels of crude oil a day, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Continuous catalytic regenerators, or reformers, make blending components for gasoline.
The gas leak poses no danger to the surrounding area, according to the Oil Refineries statement. Police said that no residents had been relocated as a result of the incident.
Oil Refineries fell 0.3 percent to 228.3 shekels at the 4:30 p.m. close in Tel Aviv.
To contact the reporter on this story: Calev Ben-David in Jerusalem at cbendavid@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net
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