The Dallas Morning News

TEXAS CITY, Texas – Andy Voelkel’s first job was at one of the local oil refineries, when he was 17 and nothing else in town paid half as much as climbing the scaffolds.

It was his brother’s first job, too. And his best friend’s first job.

In fact, pretty much everyone in this Texas City native’s life either works in the refineries or used to, before retiring or quitting or being forced out by an injury.

“If you don’t have a degree and you work on the coastline, that’s all you do is work in the refineries,” said Voelkel, who can see the BP refinery from his front yard. “Most of the people in this town, that’s what they do.”

In this part of Texas, they know danger comes with the job. It is a cruel irony in Texas City that the petrochemical industry that employs a larger share of the population and provides them with a rich tax base also is involved in the very events that sometimes scare, injure or kill them.

Now 36, Voelkel has given up after “one too many close calls” with explosions at various plants over the years.

But he said none in his lifetime was as bad as the blast down the street on Wednesday, when a unit exploded at BP and killed 15 contract workers who were doing maintenance at the plant.

A close friend of Voelkel’s is a systems operator at BP and was called in when the blast hit, Voelkel said. “His mom said he was only in there a few hours, and he was such a basket case that he had to leave,” he said. “He couldn’t take it.”

The blast literally and figuratively rocked this community of 40,000 just south of Houston, where practically everyone either works in the refineries or loves someone who does.

Everyone grieves when tragedy hits, as it sometimes does in a place where the No. 1 employer – the petrochemical industry – also has some of the most dangerous jobs in the nation.

“I grew up here. I’ve seen quite a few plant explosions over the years,” said Chachi Prudhomme, 51, who frantically called her 22-year-old son, a local contractor, just seconds after the house stopped shaking from Wednesday’s blast. “My son works in some of the other refineries, and that explosion scared me enough to where I finally just asked him to quit. He’s going to try to find something else. My two other sons work for SBC. I want him to go with them.”

Within two hours of the tragedy, the scene at Mainland Medical Center in Texas City proved to native Harold Fattig that the entire community feels it when explosions happen. Food arrived from restaurants for family members awaiting news of their fathers, brothers and cousins. And pastors from local churches came by to offer grief counseling.

One group of volunteers showed up Thursday morning with 100 Easter baskets they’d made through the night for the families who might spend the holiday in the hospital or grieving for a lost loved one.

“Yeah, we live with a certain amount of risk in the community,” said Fattig, director of marketing at the hospital who had friends injured in the blast.

“But along with that risk, we have an overwhelming sense of support here for one another – more so than in just any other community. … It’s a risk that’s inherent to the area, and I guess people living here and working here have accepted that. It’s amazing how they respond to any help that’s needed when something like this happens.”

Just minutes after Wednesday’s explosion, city and regional emergency teams went to work.

The plant set up a toll-free emergency hotline to provide information on the blast and let residents call in to report any property damage near the refinery.

Company officials have bragged that the complex produces enough gasoline to fill up a car every seven seconds. News of the blast pushed gasoline futures nearly 2 cents in late trading Wednesday after the explosion, but they had eased downward by early Thursday.

BP – formerly British Petroleum – has operated the plant, first opened in 1934, since 1999 when it bought oil company Amoco.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the refinery nearly $110,000 after two employees were burned to death by superheated water in September.

Another explosion forced the evacuation of the plant for several hours last March. Afterward, OSHA fined the refinery $63,000 for 14 safety violations, including problems with its emergency shutdown system and employee training.

Ray Soliz, a BP worker for 30 years, was in a meeting with some other members of the Pace International Union Local 4-1 on the edge of the BP campus when he heard a loud pop and then felt a blast that was like none any of them had felt in their decades of working in the industry.

“If you were overseas in the war, you knew that blast,” said Soliz, 58.

Soliz’s family, like most in this city, are concerned about the risks their loved ones take by working in the refineries, he said. They also know that no other job pays as well, and they have learned to trust that the workers are highly trained and good at what they do, he said.

“I bet my whole family called right after (the explosion) because they’re concerned. But did they say, “I wish you would quit?”‘ Soliz said. “No.”

Experience in the refineries gets you wages of $25 to $30 an hour – a good three times the average wage of a nonindustry worker in Texas City, plant workers say.

“You don’t have to know anything about anything, and you can still get a job for $10, $12, $15 an hour to start,” said Voelkel. “The money’s real, real good. But I quit because it ain’t worth it.”

The last time the BP had openings for about 50 workers, more than 2,000 applied for the job, said W.E. Sanders, union representative for PACE International Union.

But even while they describe the top-notch benefits and pay, workers and their friends and family members always, in the next breath, come back to the danger.

“You could go out there any day, walk through there, and get vaporized,” said Mike Lombardi, who worked in refineries for several years before quitting a decade ago.

Prudhomme remembers a blast at Union Carbide that rocked her house when she was an adolescent in nearby La Marque, and the occasional explosion, frantic phone calls, and worrying have accompanied her ever since.

“You don’t really think about it until it happens,” she said. “Last night, every sound and rumbling noise I heard, I wondered if something else was going to happen. But it goes away after a couple of days. You don’t dwell on it. You can’t dwell on it.”