The Department of Business and Labor has proposed a penalty of 2.1 million to Iqoxe for four very serious violations of industrial safety regulations following the serious explosion in January 2020. The most serious violation, of one million of fine euros, corresponds to the modification of the manufacturing recipe of the product without the company doing any prior testing.
Not having monitored the control room panel during the moments before and at the time of the accident and having silenced the sound alarms of the security system in that same room implies two penalties of more than half a million. The lack of specific training for workers entails a fourth fine of 100,000 euros. This is the highest industrial safety penalty that this department has proposed so far and against which the company has ten days to appeal.
The file was opened after the explosion of one of the reactors of the company Iqoxe, dedicated to the production of ethylene oxide and propylene oxide at the plant they have in Canonja (Tarragonès). Three people died in the accident, two workers at the plant and a resident of Tarragona, since a piece of steel weighing more than 800 kilos hit their building - located about three kilometers from the reactor -. The explosion also caused four injuries and serious damage to the petrochemical complex.
Empresa i Treball maintains that the company pre-manufactured a batch of the MPEG 500 product by modifying the manufacturing recipe. Specifically, the company would have changed the batch size, the catalyst to be used and the amount used, "without respecting the manufacturer's instructions, without evaluating these changes and without conducting any prior tests or trials to ascertain if the reaction was safe", he reported yesterday in a statement.
The document is closed when the judicial instruction is still in the final stretch. Sources in the department explained that the total destruction of the damaged reactor and the control room have made the investigation very difficult. As the legal proceedings are ongoing, regardless of whether or not the company submits allegations, the penalty will be suspended until a judgment is issued.
In July 2021, Inspecció de Treball de Catalunya (ITC) closed a first file in which it considered the Iqoxe accident a very serious infringement "due to various preventive breaches of occupational health and safety during the production process" and established a proposed penalty of 180,000 euros. Both this file and the one made public yesterday by Empresa i Treball will be included in the criminal case opened against Iqoxe for the explosion.
The investigation phase of the case has entered the final stretch these days with the statement before the judge of the factory managers, investigated for three crimes of reckless homicide. The Generalitat granted permission for the company to resume ethylene oxide production one year and two months after the explosion, and at the end of 2021, after implementing the improvements requested by the administration , recovered activity in the rest of the plants.
