One dead as fire hits Chevron refinery in Mississippi

A Chevron Corp worker was killed in a fire that broke out early Friday morning at a cracking unit at the US oil company's 330,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Tonya Graddy, an "operator" with 5 years of service, was killed after a fire broke out at a furnace in a gasoline-making unit known as the "Cracking II area," Chevron said.
All other workers were accounted for after the plant's emergency teams put out the fire that started at 2 am CST (0800 GMT), the company and officials from Jackson County and Pascagoula said. The fire, which is under investigation, happened a day after a Chevron pipeline unrelated to the refinery exploded in rural Milford, Texas - shooting flames high into the air and prompting evacuations but causing no injuries.
The mishap was the latest in a string of accidents in the booming US energy sector. Chevron's board trimmed Chief Executive John Watson's 2012 bonus in a bid to hold managers accountable for "operational incidents" such as a major refinery fire in California, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year. Still, the Pascagoula refinery has received few citations for safety violations from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
OSHA cited the refinery in 2009 for 10 serious violations and 1 other violation as part of a nation-wide effort to improve refinery safety after a deadly explosion in 2005 at what was then BP Plc's Texas City plant. Cash gasoline prices on the US Gulf Coast spiked briefly on news of Friday's fire before retreating, traders said. The Pascagoula refinery appeared to have been undergoing some maintenance work before the fire, according to energy intelligence group Genscape, which reported on Thursday that a unit had shut down and then had begun restarting with another unit.
Genscape, which monitors activities at refineries by camera, said on Friday the restart of the 55,000-bpd catalytic reformer, which turns naphtha into gasoline components, was halted at the time of the fire. The refinery, which began operating in 1963, is the largest of three in Mississippi. The plant can process and treat low-grade heavier, sour, foreign crude oil. It produces about 130,000 bpd of motor gasoline, 50,000 bpd of jet fuel and 68,000 bpd of diesel fuel, according to Chevron's website.