Fighting for Victims of Plant & Refinery Accidents (2023)

Plant and refinery accident lawyers investigate disasters that take place in industrial workplaces, typically in the energy industry. They’re well-versed in procedures that often result in accidents, like turnarounds, but they’re also familiar with the decisions made by upper management that lead to those plant accidents. If you’ve been injured at a plant or refinery, it’s more likely you’ll uncover what caused your accident when you speak to someone who’s investigated these cases before. That's our plant and oil refinery injury lawyers at Arnold & Itkin. We help injured workers nationwide.

Typically, the root cause of plant and refinery accidents is cost-cutting. Skeleton crews, longer shifts, and lack of maintenance are the ingredients that most often lead to an injury or even a catastrophic explosion. One major factor is aging and defective equipment in plants and refineries today. Due to aging plant machinery, the odds of a disaster increase every year that plant owners don’t invest in new equipment.

If you lost someone you love in a plant or refinery accident, you could have grounds for a wrongful death lawsuit. This is a case filed in civil court against a person or company that acted with carelessness, negligence, or wrongdoing and therefore caused your loved one's death. Our oil refinery lawyers file wrongful death cases to help families find answers, get the financial support they need to rebuild, and see justice served.

Federal law protects “whistleblowing,” which means a plant or refinery employer is barred from firing you, giving you worse hours, or cutting pay/benefits for reporting violations. If you report your factory’s poor safety to OSHA or any other agency, your employer cannot retaliate against you. If you report those same violations to an attorney, you’re also protected by attorney-client confidentiality. If you’re not sure if your employer is violating the law, you can tell a law firm and they can investigate on your behalf.

Aging or defective equipment is one of the chief causes of any given plant accident. In order to increase profitability, plant owners often delay maintenance as long as possible to keep plants in operation. When plants undergo maintenance, workers are pressured to get it done quickly to get back into production. This results in missed repairs or aging parts not getting replaced in time. Some of the nation’s worst plant and refinery disasters were caused by small, broken parts that should have been replaced but weren’t.

In many cases, it may be the plant owner. As the owner and employer, companies set safety policy, dictate maintenance schedules, and control the funding for maintenance, safety equipment, and other disaster-prevention measures. If there’s an accident, it’s almost always because a higher-up at the company made a decision to cut corners or limit maintenance costs. The other possibility is that an equipment manufacturer supplied a defective part or machine. Defective parts are often due to neglect by the plant owner, but there are many cases where the manufacturer is also to blame. In either case, our firm has held both manufacturers and owners accountable for plant accidents.