The Generalitat of Catalunya has imposed a penalty of €2.1 million to the enterprise iqoxe for four offenses in the field of industrial safety. The Departament d’Empresa i Treball has accredited that the explosion of the chemical company’s reactor, which occurred on January 14, 2020 in Tarragona and which resulted in three deaths and seven injuries, was caused by altering the recipe of a chemical product and In addition, the company silenced the alarms and breached the security protocols, as made public this Wednesday in a statement. The Generalitat had already sanctioned Iqoxe four times before the explosion for various breaches of the regulations.
The ‘conselleria’ directed by Roger Torrent has closed its investigation into the events that occurred on January 14, 2020, when a strong explosion shortly after 6:30 p.m. ended up causing the deaths of three people. Two of them were employees of the corporation and the third was a neighbor who was at his house, two kilometers from the explosion, and who died buried under the roof of his house, which collapsed due to the impact of a metal plate coming from of the accident.
The technicians of the Generalitat have been able to prove that the explosion was caused by the manufacture of a chemical product (Mpeg 500), but with the modified recipe. The Catalan administration considers it proven that the process was carried out “without respecting the instructions from the manufacturer, without evaluating the changes and without carrying out any prior test or test to verify if the reaction was safe”. At the time, Iqoxe attributed the explosion to “an unknown chemical reaction”.
However, the ‘conselleria’ for Business considers how Iqoxe reacted to the accident more negligent – at the level of the amount of the penalty – than the origin of it. According to the Catalan administration’s proposal for a fine, once the event occurred, the company’s management opted to silence the sirens of the security system in the control room. Which explains why the alarms did not go off for the confinement of the population of the surrounding municipalities, given the risk of toxic clouds. Although in the end said cloud did not occur and the incident was limited to a large explosion.
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They also censure the company for negligence in its functions of prevention and surveillance, since at the time of the event there was no one in the control room to supervise that the manufacturing work on the Mpeg 500 was carried out in accordance with the regulations. And to this is added that there were workers who did not have specific training to carry out all their functions.
conflicting track record
Iqoxe accumulates a conflictive history from before the explosion in La Canonja, as well as in the immediate reaction to it. The company was penalized by the Labor Inspectorate for minor infractions, such as imposing certain working conditions on its employees and failing to comply with issues related to occupational health and safety. The Generalitat sanctioned the company again shortly after the accident, since it began cleaning the site of the event without the prior authorization of the Generalitat.