Second in a series

In an instant, his face was on fire.

Flames burned Anselmo Lopez’s arms and chest, and the explosion knocked back three co-workers whose eardrums burst.

Lopez had been doing maintenance last October, pumping inert nitrogen through pipes at the SunEdison plant outside Houston, to flush out a highly volatile gas called silane.

When his crew opened a valve, silane leaked and combined with air. The mixture ignited.

Though SunEdison over the years had paid thousands in fines from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, safety remained a problem. Lopez’s injury — which would require multiple skin grafts and lifelong care — was the fifth time in nearly a decade that the plant had a toxic release, fire or serious safety violation.

It’s unusual that OSHA inspectors had been there at all.

Most Americans don’t know about chemical stockpiles near homes and schools, and often, the government doesn’t, either. The U.S. regulatory system is poorly funded and has outdated, complex rules that go unenforced, leaving facilities that handle hazardous chemicals mostly to police themselves, a Houston Chronicle investigation found.

The result: A government that reacts only to the worst accidents and does little to prevent them, even though the same mistakes keep happening.

OSHA doesn’t have enough inspectors to perform its mission, and its fines are paltry, even by its own measure.

The Environmental Protection Agency left gaping holes in its regulations despite its own calls for change and the president’s mandate to make improvements.

And the U.S. Chemical Safety Board plugs along with a tiny budget, taking on massively complicated investigations and issuing recommendations that go largely ignored by federal agencies.

Not enough inspectors

Chemical safety experts from around the world gathered last year in Austin for the Global Congress on Process Safety.

Presenters and attendees talked in industry jargon — about good engineering practices and hazard studies and using data to recognize potential dangers.

Everyone was reminded about the importance of constant vigilance.

When someone wanted to lighten the mood, he’d bring up OSHA. As a punch line.

Some at the conference had little faith that OSHA inspectors are qualified to evaluate chemical process safety, and even when they are, there aren’t enough of them.

OSHA is charged with protecting American workers but has 1,840 inspectors — roughly the same since 1981 — for 8 million U.S. workplaces. Inspecting every facility one time would take 145 years, according to the AFL-CIO.

Only 267 OSHA inspectors have specialized training for about 15,000 chemical facilities.

In 2011, the agency began a chemical emphasis program, but it looks at a relatively small number of plants. An analysis by the Chronicle and researchers at the Texas A&M University Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center ranked thousands of facilities in greater Houston on their potential to harm the public. OSHA did not inspect most of the top 55 facilities in the last five years.

Dr. Sam Mannan, director of the O’Connor center and one of the nation’s preeminent experts on chemical safety, advocates for third-party inspections because federal agencies aren’t doing enough. The EPA is embracing the idea in a proposed rule change, over the strong objections of industry.

Rigorous enforcement creates a dialogue between government and industry, Mannan said, and ensures that companies breaking rules don’t fall through cracks.

OSHA penalties are mostly unchanged since 1990. Fines for four deaths after a preventable gas leak in November 2014 at the DuPont plant in La Porte totaled $372,000. That's about half of 1 percent of an average day’s revenue for the corporation.

The head of OSHA, Assistant Labor Secretary David Michaels, told a Senate panel in December 2014 that “our criminal penalties are virtually meaningless.”

The imbalance between fines for environmental violations and catastrophic safety problems can reach the absurd.

In 2001, a sulfuric acid tank exploded at a refinery in Delaware, killing Jeff Davis.

“His body had virtually decomposed,” Michaels said.

Workers had long warned the company about problems with the tank. OSHA issued a $132,000 fine. Because the incident polluted air and water and killed wildlife, EPA won a $12 million civil settlement.

“Can you imagine telling Jeff Davis’ wife, Mary, their five kids that the fine for the hazards associated with his death was one-fiftieth of the fine associated with killing fish and crabs?” he said.