Man's house blows up, companies responsible won't help
Ian Silvestein's house was destroyed three years when the Buncefield Depot in England blew up. The companies that operated the depot -- Total and Chevron -- won't help him.
Literally, nothing has been done to help him with his situation — or anybody for that matter. The local authorities have failed him, the governments have failed him, insurance has failed him, and the companies that operated the facilities — Total and Chevron — have ducked blame entirely. The massive companies made more than £18 billion in cash last year, but can’t help a few people out when a leak in their tanks caused massive and catastrophic damage to dozens of people’s lives.Man's house blows up, companies responsible won't help (Thanks, Jake!)
the latest
latest episodes
If that had happened in the US there's a good chance it would have gone exactly the same way with one exception. In the USA someone would probably have pointed a gun at him at some point and told him he was trespassing in his own house.
I was waiting for the "Feed the Children" host to step out and say, "There are people all over the world suffering from home explosions tonight. Can you take a minute to help Ian have a beautiful home once again?"
I would have sent some change since I already sponsor a child. I have room in my heart for Ian.
I'd say it's too early to say nothing has been done since the court case hasn't concluded. Interesting bit from that article:
"Earlier this year, Total admitted in preliminary hearings that the blast was the result of negligence by the supervisor on duty at the time. However, it has only accepted liability for properties within 451 metres of the blast on the grounds that damage to property beyond that could not have been predicted.
Claimants whose properties lay further than 451 metres from the site of the explosion will have to prove that damage to their properties was foreseeable. That includes more than 170 local residents and small businesses."
Which came first? The surrounding houses or the fuel facility? I'd say that the burden rests upon Total to inform the populace just how far a potential blast radius could reach.
Which came first? The surrounding houses or the fuel facility?
Which came first? the loss of your heart, or your mind?
I'd say that the burden rests upon Total to inform the populace just how far a potential blast radius could reach.
I'd say the burden rests on Total to insure the populace that lays within their potential blast radius against such avoidable accidents.
I'd also say the burden rests on Total to not be such terrible neighbors to people who have lived in mortal danger in the name of the corporate bottom line.
As Emerson once said, good blast walls make good neighbors.
In the US, he'd certainly have a really good court case if he sued. I have no idea what the UK is like in that respect. Can anyone in the know in the UK explain?
Can someone fill me in on why "predictability" matters here?
EDITZ-
Is that right? Total is denying liability because it wasn't forseeable that there would be damage beyond 451 meters? What does forseeability have to do with the issue at all? (I'm not yelling at you, I'm just nonplussed.)
So Total is arguing that since the result of their negligence was so surprisingly bad, they're not liable for all of it? They're only liable for the part that was unsurprisingly bad?
Isn't this a plain case of negligence? Can't the guy simply sue them and be done with it? Aren't there lawyers eager to take easy cases like this on spec?
Which came first? The surrounding houses or the fuel facility?
Besides agreeing with mdh, even if the houses came later, the government would have to duke it out with the company over liability.
Things like this make living in litigious California seem a little more reasonable. He would have had an appropriate settlement check two years ago.
The defense seems to me like the most ass-backwards logic ever. Can someone clarify ?
ie: The gas firm claims that it is immune because the damage was not forseeable, and that claimaints would have to prove that damage was forseeable. But if damage was forseeable, its a case of their mitigating systems not working correctly -- and if the damage wasn't forseeable, it just means that the company has bad analysts. I don't understand how liability can only lay when the outcome is forseeable.
The house was "destroyed three years"? How slooow was this explosion?
"Can someone fill me in on why "predictability" matters here?"
I wondered the same thing. Usually, if a consequence is not normally predictable, it becomes very difficult to prove negligence.
But they are admitting (or are unable to deny) predictable consequences withing a smaller blast radius.
Perhaps it's because the companies only purchased liability insurance for damages within that smaller blast radius, and any further damages would have to be paid out of their own pockets?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
MDH, your first post is completely wrong, and your second post completely fabricated something to be upset with another commenter about. Chill out, man.
In the US, the company's insurance would be bending over backwards to replace the house, provided he promised not to sue. In the US, tainted tap water has let to AEP buying an entire town, after having provided many gallons of bottled water every day for consumption and bathing.
I've not dealt with insurance claims on quite this level, but I have dealt with large claims. And they certainly didn't involve someone pointing a gun at me. I have no idea where you got that screwed up idea.
I don't understand how liability can only lay when the outcome is forseeable.
Clearly you're not an insurance industry lawyer, because I assure you (as someone who writes environmental risk assessment documents for insurance industry lawyers) that they do think that way.
They all think they're overconservative, but they're not physicists or chemists - so they shop their analysis around for the best price and stick with the firms that give them good news. Doubly so when it's the insured who are hiring the consultants.
Keep giving them honest analysis and some of them will hand future work to a consultancy firm that will say what they want to hear - and some of the consultants will do just that. I've quit jobs over this nonsense (when I found a 20,000 gallon hazardous waste tank that had been unattended for 15 years and somehow that wasn't in the report that the bank and the state got copies of). It does happen. Money talks and not every consultancy is run by a sage old honest engineer.
Wherever there are corners to be cut, there is money to be made. That is the world we live in.
MDH, your first post is completely wrong, and your second post completely fabricated something to be upset with another commenter about.
See New Orleans. See Galveston. See where the site of a disaster becomes off limits with armed enforcement. In the UK the police don't have guns and private security firms aren't hired for civilian law enforcement.
My second comment expressed that I found Editz attitude to be both heartless and soulless. I stand by that assertion. It's not meant to be a character assassination. Glad you stood up for him though.
And I HAVE dealt with insurace claims that affect thousands of neighbors, for 500+ million dollar policies. I have consulted even as the lead - on the purchase of factories and powerplants and whole city blocks. It's amazing what gets buried.
The Buncefield explosion at the Hemel Hempstead oil depot was caused by negligence, a High Court judge has ruled .
Mr Justice David Steel ruled that oil giant Total UK's negligence had led to Britain's biggest peacetime explosion in December 2005.
Compensation claims worth hundreds of millions of pounds have been filed.
A third company, Chevron, involved in the legal action, has denied negligence.
Further court proceedings are due to take place in October.
If no settlement is reached prior to the court date, the judge will rule on liability and the size of any damages.
Although Total UK will admit the incident was due to negligence the oil giant will argue it should not be liable for damages as it could not have foreseen that it would cause the destruction that it did.
A report in 2006 by an independent investigation board found human error and faulty safety equipment were responsible for the explosion.
http://www.times-series.co.uk/news/2294668.buncefield_fire_negligent/
MANY THANKS TO YOU ALL FOR YOUR KIND WORD AND SUPPORT.
I WILL KEEP AN EYE ON THE POSTS AND TRY AND ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS I CAN.
MY HOME WAS BUILT IN 1911 AND THE OIL DEPOT WAS BUILT IN THE 1960'S !
THANK YOU
IAN SILVERSTEIN 'THE MAN WHO'S HOUSE BLEW UK' UK
I am not a lawyer, let alone a UK lawyer, and I don't know about forseeability, though that sounds like a criterion for a charge of negligence; the phrase "knew or should have known" comes up a lot in these kinds of cases. So if you keep lots of explosives in a residential neighborhood, and one day they blow up, you're negligent (at least), even if you didn't know they might explode, because you SHOULD have known they might; on the other hand, if you buy a cement bird bath from a cement bird bath store, and one day it explodes, you're not negligent (supposing it wasn't advertised as an EXPLODING bird bath).
So the issue of forseeability comes in as part of the determination of whether the company "knew or should have known" and should have taken steps to prevent this from happening. Much as we'd like it to be otherwise sometimes, the legal system doesn't compensate people just because something bad happened to them; the party they're suing has to have done something wrong (in a legal sense: criminal or tortious).
It's unsatisfying, when such a wealthy company doesn't have to pay and someone has suffered so terribly. The trouble is that if you DON'T structure things that way, then your neighbors can sue you for the death of their dog when your birdbath explodes. After all, your birdbath killed their dog, and if you have money why shouldn't they get some of it? After all, they lost their dog.
However, dividing up the blast radius seems pretty weird. Like I said, IANAL, and maybe that sort of thing happens all the time, but ISTM that either the company was liable for the explosion or not, and if they were they should be liable for all the damage it caused. I mean, give me a break.
All that said, the UK does have some crazy-ass laws. Their libel law, for example, includes the prohibition against the publication of TRUE information that damages someone's reputation. I'm not sure how far that goes; if I know that my neighbor is torturing ten-year-olds in her basement, and I write about it in the local newspaper, can she sue me for libel even after the torture chamber is found, with her in flagrante, and she's arrested? I'm not sure. But it's crazy enough to cast a chill over calling people (and companies) on their evil behavior. Which, I'd submit, is why a company even tries to get away with the kind of shit posted here.
As I've said repeatedly, I Am Not A Lawyer and This Is Not Legal Advice.
Seems to have been some hearing loss.
"since the court case hasn't concluded"
You don't need a legal judgment to do the right thing.
The limitation on what could be foreseeable is strange. I would think that anyone who built AFTER the plant, in an area of foreseeable risk? Well, they would be seen as assuming that risk, knowing that there was a plant there. Anything before or OUTSIDE the foreseeable zone, I would think would be covered.
I mean, "Terribly sorry we didn't know that we could blow up your house" doesn't seem like a logical defense.
>However, it has only accepted liability for properties within 451 metres of the blast on the grounds that damage to property beyond that could not have been predicted.
This is now incorrect, they gave up on the 451 point, the ONLY issue of liability now is the share of the costs between the two companies.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds/bucks/herts/7655961.stm
>Which came first? The surrounding houses or the fuel facility?
FYI the depot came first, they did want to keep a protection zone around the plant, but the council built on it anyway. That doesn't mean they are not 100% liable for the damage they caused though.
If it had happened 24 hours later on the Monday instead of the sunday theres a good chance I would be dead, my office was totally trashed by the shock wave.
Clearly it's the usual case of big companies arguing over which one of them has to pay for this, but meanwhile the little people get the shaft. Shouldn't homeowner's insurance take care of this and then that insurance company sues Chvron and Total?
Dear Ian:
Best wishes and best of luck in your fight. What happened to you could happen to any of us.
Also, please don't type in capital letters since that means you are shouting - not that shouting isn't justified in your case.
I'm going to drive down a freeway with a blindfold on until I hit something, and then cop a plea that I couldn't have predicted what I hit. Car full of kids? Petrol tanker? A tree? I just don't care! Not my fault!
On a more serious note - you'd expect that the government would wade in here.
People have been getting all up in arms about the "451 meters" and "predictability" thing, apparently without bothering to actually *think* about it.
That's a good chunk over a quarter mile away. Visualize that for a bit.
It's quite likely that the logic was: "There's a computable chance that it could, in fact, go ka-boom, and with X number of gallons of Y ka-boomable stuff, that will make a ka-boom of Z size. That's probably going to totally trash the tanks, and most stuff within 100 meters/yards. A quarter mile away, it will probably just break some windows and similar damage, but any buildings not on our depot property should survive without major issues".
The standard to meet there would be "Could/should they have known that if it went ka-boom, yeah, it really *could* create a ka-boom THAT FRIKKING BIG".
Total devastation. Totally unconscionable!
That's it, I'm never buying that cereal again.
@MDH: No, in the US they would have sued in civil court and won.
@ 18. Xopher re 'reputation'
IANAL. I believe that about half way through this article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/11/humanrights-privacy
your asertion is refuted.
Just remember that in any country the law can be, and offten is, an ass.
@MDH: No, in the US they would have sued in civil court and won.
Yeah, we all know how quickly the WR Grace asbestos lawsuits, the GE PCB site suits, the Union Carbide Bhopal suits have all been paying out huge sums and were resolved within a couple dozen months. None of those civil suits based on unacceptably risky corporate operations were tied up for decades in the courts. Nope. None. (that's sarcasm, fyi)
However I think you DO make the most salient point, which is that his gov't has also failed him - at least by not providing that outlet.
The part in this where each additional person has to prove their loss in court is really a form of barratry against people who have had a catastrophic loss on that scale. It's a means test for environmental justice.
Ultimately it's about having the right not to let the big bad wolf blow your house down because you couldn't afford brick.
Xopher
I'm not a lawyer either, but my understanding is that damaging revelations published in the UK must be "in the public interest".
As an example, a famous sport/business figure was recently reported (truthfully) to be engaging in BDSM orgies which involved the women dressing up in Nazi uniforms and shouting in German accents. A quick google should bring up the original stories (I think it was in the Daily Hate) if you want that in your search history ;).
Anyway, it was ruled that the paper shouldn't have published this because, although true, it was harmful to that individual but none of anyone's damn business; the public wasn't made and safer, wealthier or whatever by learning the details of this guy's sex life.
In your example, identifying a criminal is absolutely in the public interest, as you can claim that the information is making a community safer. This tends to be interpreted pretty broadly: weakly-sourced gossip about, say, the Royal Family and various Government ministers' families, hairdressers, etc is generally fair game as it could conceivably affect the running of the country.
IIRC, it's actually harder to press a libel case here than in the USA. I think here the claimant has to prove that damage was done and to put a suitable monetary figure on it (e.g. lost earnings), whereas in the US the onus is on the newspaper (or whatever) has to prove that they didn't cause any harm, which is much more difficult. This is part of the reason that our tabloid papers are much more vicious than yours: they're presumed to be acting in the public interest until someone hires a very expensive team of lawyers to prove otherwise. All this is a pretty vague memory though - any actual lawyers want to correct me?
The WR Grace/Union Carbide comparisons are apples to oranges.
There you have thousands of people trying to prove their health issues/deaths etc. were caused by a company's neglect.
That's much more difficult to prove than this case, were you have very obvious damage to a piece of physical property, and the source which caused the damage isn't being disputed at all. They can't very well claim spontaneous combustion occurred at his house at the same moment the explosion occurred.
They can't very well claim spontaneous combustion occurred at his house at the same moment the explosion occurred.
Making everyone outside a given radius prove their case is exactly equivalent to what the company/their insurers are saying.
"It can't be OUR fault, it was outside this radius!!!!" IS the working model for the lawsuits.
Still apples and oranges?
@MDH
"My second comment expressed that I found Editz attitude to be both heartless and soulless. I stand by that assertion. It's not meant to be a character assassination."
Huh? I think you're reading waaay too much into my statement.
Reading these comments, I see we still have conflicting information on what was built first - the homes or the facility.
My point was that if Total plopped a fuel depot into a residential area, it would seem they have an obligation to provide some darn good protection. But like you say, perhaps the figures were fudged for the sake of saving/making money.
If the depot came first and residents were allowed to build around it, I would suppose the town officials would have some kind of responsibility to ensure citizen safety. But they could have simply taken Total's word for it when trying to determine a safe minimum distance due to lack of funds for an independent study, laziness, etc.
As it stands, it all appears to be moot and now the argument is simply on how much money is to be awarded. In my opinion it sounds like there were screw-ups on both sides.
I'm sorry the guy had his house destroyed but I don't see how you can possibly interpret my attitude as "heartless".
editz, sorry if you took offense.
It seemed from the first post that you were arguing from the position that the victims should have known better than to move in near an oil depot, or someone should have known better than to build a house there.
That may be a reasonable argument relative to the stink of a farm, or the noise from a nightclub, or the erosion of a shoreline - but I don't think it's a reasonable argument that the residents should have seen a huge fireball coming as a plausible scenario when even the industrial facility owners themselves did not.
When the house was built is much less relevant than when the tank farm last changed hands and was re-insured and re-permitted.
Because those houses certainly were around then.
Besides, I'm pretty certain you can't be grandfathered out of public safety laws.
Mrs Palsgraf says she knows just how he feels.
/B. Cardozo
Wouldn't it amount to communism to help this guy?
How about Home Extreme Makeover branches out to England. Seriously this guy deserves something like this just as much as any other family on the show.
That's the problem here, these big corporations are so inconsiderate that it all comes down to lawsuits, insurance, and technicalities for them to actually take responsibility for what they did. They should have fixed this by themselves because it's obvious they were responsible for it, no matter what the law says.
would it not have been cheaper for the company just to build the guy a new house and slip him a little extra to keep quiet and for his trouble than use up a sizable portion of the legal retainer fund and make this heartless company look even more heartless?
i wonder if that even came up in the cost-benefit analysis of how to deal with this disaster...
/451/ metres
Farenheit /451/
Synchronicity, anyone?
K
if you buy a cement bird bath from a cement bird bath store, and one day it explodes, you're not negligent (supposing it wasn't advertised as an EXPLODING bird bath)
Was it a Johnson?
Article from BBC local radio about the second anniversary last year
For a bit of background: Hemel Hempstead is a commuter town about 20 miles north-west of London. The Buncefield explosion was the largest in Europe since WW2. The plume from the explosion was visible across the south of England: my sister told me that she could see it from Croydon, and that the sky was dark by about 2pm that day. I didn't realise it was three years ago though.
Also not a lawyer, but...
Regarding the 451 metre thing, it's like the bird bath analogy that Xopher used - you can't be sued for damage that your concrete bird bath caused when it exploded, because it wasn't foreseeable. Similarly, if you buy a small firework and keep it in your shed, and it goes off, sets your shed alight, and the neighbours adjoining fence too, I would guess you're liable for the fence, but if it goes off in one massive explosion that decimates two entire blocks, you would probably still only be liable for the neighbours fence - damage was foreseeable, but not that extent of damage. And its about being foreseeable, not about being foreseen. If you're an idiot, that shouldn't help you.
Man, it really sucks to be that guy. He should find a way to get back at Chevron and the other company, Street Justice FTW.
@bugs #31: You might be interested in this case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mclibel
There's a documentary about it which breaks down the nature of UK libel laws much better than I could explain. The upshot is that McDonalds sued two british activists for passing out a pamphlet which McDonalds claims told lies about the corporation.
Because of the structure of UK libel law, the activists were forced to try to positively prove that every point made on the flyer was true. Because they could not present enough evidence and witnesses to convince the judge of the truth of every single point, they were very heavily fined.
Comparing a volatile fuel depot to a concrete birdbath is both unnecessarily pedantic (I know, on Boing Boing, who knew?) and misleading at the same time.
Now, if you leave your concrete birdbath on a cocked trebuchet overnight, and it launches into your neighbors house because a neighbors cat pees on it, and kills your neighbors prize african Gray parrot, who is liable? The cat? The urine itself? the person who left their valuable in the flight path of a flying birdbath? Or is it the fault of the guy who owns the trebuchet and the birdbath - for failing to turn the trebuchet away from their house before neglecting the constant danger it poses when loaded?
But hey, if you want to blame the parrot for not moving, or pick on the cat owner for letting the cat out, you can have at it.
Fuel depots DO explode. It DOES happen. it IS foreseeable, if not predictable to the day. The default position for people who work with fuel has to be "this stuff is gonna explode if I let my guard down", or those people will be dead.
and to be fair, if this happened in the US, it would likely play out much like this story has.
Good Luck Ian.
errr, this story
MDH, the point of the birdbath analogy was to illustrate a case in which it was NOT reasonable to hold the owner accountable for the damage, because the damage was not foreseeable.
The explosion of the fuel depot WAS foreseeable, as you point out. I was just trying to show why foreseeability makes a difference, a point some in this thread didn't seem to get.
Fuel depots explode with some regularity. Birdbaths do not. The damage from an exploding fuel depot is foreseeable; the damage from an exploding birdbath is not. That was my point.
And in your example, I think the guy who left the birdbath in the trebuchet is responsible. Of course.
Silly. Do you realize that someday we'll talk about trebucheting birdbaths and no one who wasn't in this thread will know WTF we're talking about?
Also, it should be a Norwegian Blue parrot. Because then the lawyer for the guy with the trebuchet could argue not only that his client wasn't at fault, but that the bird is not dead. "It's pinin' for the fjords," he would say.
Just to clarify something about libel in the UK.
There is no law on libel. It is a civil matter i.e. a tort. A case is bought by one who fears their reputation has been damaged and they are seeking damages. If they prove their case either a jury or a judge decides what the damages are and then awards them. Libel is based on common law - i.e. based on decisions by judges (precedent).
The only defences [are] justification, where the truth of the allegations had to be proved, fair comment on a matter of public interest, which protected only comment and not imputations of fact, or qualified privilege, which protected statements of fact where the person who makes a communication has an interest or a duty, legal, social, or moral, to make it to the person to whom it is made.
and recently
[a] reportage defence, according to the judges in the Searchlight case, is that a journalist has a good defence to a claim for libel if what he or she publishes, even without an attempt to verify its truth, is the neutral reporting without adoption or embellishment or subscribing to any belief in its truth of attributed allegations of both sides of a political and possibly other kinds of dispute. (www.irr.org.uk/2008/march/ha000023)
The case of Mosely v News of the World, involving the reporting of sado masochism activities was not a libel case but a case of breach of privacy. (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7523034.stm).
However the important element in libel is when a libel is committed what the damages might be. In a notorious case in 1964 Dering, a German doctor sued Leon Uris who had written in his book Exodus that the doctor had performed a particular number of 'operations' on people in a nazi extermination camp without anaesthetic.
Uris had got his detailed facts wrong and the case was found against him but the doctor from his evidence was clearly a nazi and had committed serious war crimes. The doctor was awarded a half penny damages and had to pay both his and Uris' legal costs.