Buncefield trial

Total UK has previously admitted three health and safety breaches in connection with the explosion, while the British Pipeline Agency Ltd had also admitted two charges. She said fines in relation to breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act could be unlimited, while an Environment Agency spokeswoman said the same applied for breaches of the Water Resources Act.

In a joint statement, the bodies said: "This was the biggest and most complex criminal inquiry we have worked on together - the product of many hundreds of hours of painstaking forensic investigation.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. View all. Download our Professional Engineering app. A weekly round-up of the most popular and topical stories featured on our website, so you won't miss anything. Subscribe to Professional Engineering newsletter. Opt into your industry sector newsletter. The court heard how there was no proper management chain at Buncefield, a failure to abide by baseline "good practice guidance", "insufficient awareness" of the potential for an accident and no system for investigating near misses.

Andrew Langdon QC, prosecuting in the Buncefield case on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive and Environment Agency, told the court that employers could have done much more to ensure staff could perform their jobs better at the site, near Hemel Hempstead.

They didn't get any risk assessments worth their name — pretty essential you might think — how the tanks should be filled, how they should be emptied, what happens with all these considerations," he said. Training manuals were found to be out of date and there was found to be a "degree of fatigue" among the supervisors tasked with keeping the depot safe.

Contracts with companies who worked onsite were found to be insufficiently clear, with contractors unsure of lines of responsibly. Mr Justice Calvert-Smith, the judge who presided over the case, summarised there had been "a large number of failures with systems and procedures on site".

HOSL was found guilty on Wednesday, but the verdict could not be reported until today, when the company's lawyers brought the trial to a premature end by pleading guilty to additional charges relating to the causing of pollution to enter controlled waters underlying the vicinity around Buncefield.

The charges carry unlimited fines, and the penalties could run into millions. Among the other companies implicated in the trial were the British Pipeline Agency, which admitted two charges relating to environmental damage. Yesterday also saw guilty verdicts brought against two other companies linked to the Buncefield site. The Buncefield incident featured a failure of containment, both for the fuel in the storage tanks and the firewater used to extinguish the blaze, at three levels: primary, secondary and tertiary.

The paramount need is to ensure that fuel does not escape from its storage tank and further precautions need to be taken to prevent this happening. If it does, then there is a need to inhibit the formation of a flammable vapour. Improvements to maintaining primary containment must be considered by industry and the competent authorities, the report states.

These include:. Industry should also embark on a review of the purpose, specifications, capacity, construction and maintenance of secondary and tertiary containment systems, in particular the bund walls around tank pits. Any such review should lead to the early publication of revised guidance, which should be capable of being insisted on by legislation.

Further ahead, the report identifies a need for research into the human and organisational factors that contribute to the safe operation of major hazard sites, and additional standards for the layout of such sites. In the light of findings so far, the report says that operators of oil storage depots should review their on-site emergency plans and the adequacy of information they supply to local authorities so that they take account of the potential for a vapour cloud explosion.

A number of separate reviews are currently looking at the effectiveness of the emergency response to the Buncefield incident. Although the report praises the response of fire and police services, it notes that there are lessons that can be drawn from this exceptional event, particularly in view of the high financial cost of the response effort.

While the public health impact of the incident was minimal, it did reveal the importance of prompt, useful advice to first responders and to the public.