Employees say lax safety protocols at Longview Gas Plant are a disaster waiting to happen

• Samuel Shaw  news-journal.com

https://www.news-journal.com/news/local/employees-say-lax-safety-pr...

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series about the Longview Gas Plant near White Oak and its ownership. The News-Journal takes the credibility of its reporting seriously, and its policy is to use anonymous sources only in rare circumstances. Anonymous sources in this story have been used because of an established threat of retaliation. The credentials of all plant employees have been verified.

More than 600 miles of pipeline converge at the Longview Gas Plant just outside the city limits, hidden from view by a barricade of pine trees off U.S. 80.

The plant plays an important role in processing low-quality or “off-spec” gas produced across the region, separating the mixture into valuable end products, including propane, hexane, butane and condensate. No other East Texas facility can convert the low-value mix into high-value fossil fuels, and without the plant’s services, the bobbing heads of oil horses across several counties would grind to a halt.

Because of the plant’s economic significance and the danger presented by the 50 million cubic feet of volatile gas it can process, the Department of Homeland Security and the Texas Railroad Commission — which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry — consider the plant critical energy infrastructure.

Explosions at commercial gas facilities can and have been disastrous in Texas, while hazardous material releases from pipelines and gas plants pose their own risks to the environment.

Current and former Longview Gas Plant employees say a chaotic working environment and cavalier attitude toward safety by the facility's Brazilian ownership — illustrated by a worker death, two fires and an oil spill, among other incidents — are endangering East Texans.

The Longview Gas Plant was acquired by a Houston-based company called J. Global Energy Midstream (JGE) in 2020. JGE and its many subsidiaries are controlled by Ricardo Magro, a businessman and tax lawyer identified by Brazilian authorities as that nation’s largest tax evaders, according to O Globo, Brazil’s largest news publication and confirmed by an internal Brazilian police memo obtained by the News-Journal.

“Going to work at [the Longview Gas Plant] was like being in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ You wake up every day, and it’s like a whole different world because nothing makes sense,” said Colleen Wright, a former JGE administrative assistant.

JGE officials did not respond to several calls, emails or a detailed list of questions for this article.

A deadly fire

In October 2023, two contract welders, Arturo Jimenez Jr. and Christopher Allen, were sent to JGE’s Danville Compressor Station on the outskirts of Kilgore, a few miles south of the gas plant. Like a vacuum, the facility — which is no longer operational — helped suck gas through portions of the company’s pipeline network.

The two men didn’t know the ground beneath them was saturated with petroleum products.

Their welding equipment likely sparked flammable vapors lingering inside the building, according to a Kilgore Fire Department investigation. First responders found Allen with minor burns a short distance from the structural fire standing beside Jimenez.

But Jimenez was less fortunate. Allen dragged his coworker out of the blaze, he told Kilgore and Gregg County fire marshals, and Jimenez was transported to Christus Good Shepherd Medical Center with severe burns to 95% of his body. He would later die from his injuries.

Federal investigators with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said it was a preventable accident that never would have occurred had JGE maintained a safe jobsite.

OSHA issued more than $43,000 in fines to JGE Midstream for three “serious” violations related to workplace safety following the incident.

“The employer did not develop and/or maintain an effective fire protection and prevention program at the job site throughout all phases of the construction, repair, alteration or demolition work,” stated one citation, while another highlighted the failure to remove hazardous materials from the jobsite.

The death became another unsettling reminder for employees: If a company cuts corners in the gas industry, it could cost them their lives.

“We should have had everything in place for if something were to happen, just like any other place I've worked at,” a JGE employee said after the fire. “There was none of that. I don’t want to see anybody hurt, and I want to go home every day. This is the kind of stuff (our managers) don't pay attention to.”

With the industrial volumes of pressurized, flammable products flowing through the Longview Gas Plant and its pipeline network, it’s not just company staff who are at risk in the event of a serious malfunction.

“I feel like it's a danger to not only us, but if something really bad happens to that place, we can lose a lot of the area from the amount of gas stuff we have in there,” one employee told the News-Journal in late 2024.

A large gas transmission line in rural Kentucky exploded in 2019, killing one person, injuring six others and destroying five homes. The National Transportation Safety Board identified multiple safety issues with how that line was managed and evaluated leading up to the blast.

Closer to home, Dallas-based Atmos Energy has experienced six gas pipeline explosions and a gas plant explosion since 2019, resulting in two deaths and at least a dozen injuries.

One former JGE employee hopes regulators will step in before anything like the blast in Kentucky or the Dallas-Fort Worth area takes place in East Texas. That employee remembers a close call in November 2024, when JGE imported a poorly welded debutanizer from a Brazilian company called Citrotec.

The 60-foot cylindrical machines are critical for separating volatile gasses at the plant. The News-Journal verified the transaction using a publicly available import receipt called a bill of lading.

“I’m looking at the welds, and I’m going, ‘Oh my gosh, look at these welds … and all these bolts were loose.’ The experts at the plant concluded the welds would not hold under pressure and they all had to be redone,” the employee said.

Faulty welds increase the chance of what gas industry professionals call a vapor cloud explosion.

The debutanizer scare followed a separate fire at a JGE property in June, this time at the plant itself.

The White Oak Volunteer Fire Department responded to a blazing compressor at the facility. Nobody was killed, and the fire was quickly contained, but a former on-site employee who responded to the incident said it was a small miracle.

“All the safety monitors, like gas monitors, vibration monitors, have been bypassed ever since JGE owned the plant, so it wouldn't shut down,” the former employee said.

A worker was chased out of the building by a fireball, “and if he hadn't been 20-something years old and able to turn around and run like a sprinter, he would have died.”

The incident is immortalized in a video captured by a plant surveillance camera, which is now used for educational purposes: “It looks like a clip from a ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie where Tom Cruise is running out with flames surrounding him,” the former employee said.

The plant is the largest fossil fuel facility in the White Oak fire district, and a more severe accident there could quickly threaten nearby residents, said Cameron Kizzia, the White Oak Volunteer Fire Department chief and fire marshal.

“If something catastrophic happened… I mean, the city limits are right across the railroad tracks from the plant, just a few hundred feet,” Kizzia said. “It would affect the city itself. Depending on how big the catastrophe is and wind direction, it could cause evacuations in the surrounding areas up into the city of White Oak or out further into the county.”

Even small fires at the plant like the June 2024 compressor blaze have disrupted the wider area. That fire briefly halted Amtrak and freight traffic on the Union Pacific railroad abutting the plant property because of a water hose running across it, the White Oak Fire Department incident report stated.

‘Disregard of the rules’

Gathering, transporting and processing hazardous gas is risky work. Between 2004 and 2023, there were eight deaths and 27 injuries from accidents on Texas’ gas transmission network, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Accidents involving toxic air and water pollutants are common, too.

The Texas Railroad Commission has fewer than 100 inspectors monitoring nearly half-a-million miles of oil and gas pipeline webbed through the state's forests, watersheds and private property, said Virginia Palacios, the executive director of Commission Shift, a group focused on reforming the railroad commission.

As a result, the task of reporting accidents and responding to them largely falls on companies.

Yet even within the context of Texas’ oil and gas industry — and the permissive regulatory environment governing it, according to Palacios — those familiar with JGE said its business practices stand out for the wrong reasons.

“Frankly, it's not uncommon to find domestic companies that don't comply with every regulation…. But to me, this is an unusual case, because JGE seems flagrant about their disregard of the rules,” said Shawn Latchford, an attorney with Bruster PLLC representing former American JGE employees in a discrimination lawsuit against the company.

“It’s my impression that this is a case of a Brazilian company that bought a United States company and tried to operate it as if it were still in Brazil,” Latchford said, though Magro, JGE’s owner, has attracted scrutiny from law enforcement in his home country, too.

JGE employees said they came into conflict with their Brazilian managers in July 2024 after they were deterred from reporting an oil spill on the White Oak property of 92-year-old Dale Thomas.

JGE’s pipeline team discovered an open valve on one of the gas plant’s gathering lines as well as an iridescent sheen coating the creek beside it. An estimated 10 barrels of oil polluted the water and surrounding land.

However, when employees attempted to comply with state law and report the spill to the railroad commission, they were instructed by their managers not to inform anyone, multiple workers recalled.

Employees decided to send anonymous tips about the spill to the commission, aware that state law is strict when it comes to reporting spills on active waterways. JGE’s pipeline technicians told their superiors about the spill the day it was discovered, according to internal text messages obtained by the News-Journal.

Meanwhile, other workers tried to advocate for a professional response.

Curtis Mable, the JGE health, safety and environmental manager, requested to have a third-party remediator conduct a thorough cleanup of the spill on Thomas' property, according to internal emails obtained by the News-Journal. 

Dirt was shoveled on the contaminated soil while leaf blowers were used to push the oil slick into absorbent pads, workers said. The remnants of Hurricane Beryl arrived a week later to wash away most of what was left. Wright, who also assisted with purchasing, said the plant’s general manager, Mauricio Mascolo, opted to have JGE employees clean it up instead.

Cristiano Beraldo, JGE’s chief executive officer, and plant general manager Mauricio Mascolo declined to answer a list of questions from the News-Journal about the company’s spill response.

Railroad commission investigators arrived in mid-July to follow up on the tips. Their post-investigation report on the spill clarified how JGE’s on-site managers, though informed of the incident the day it was discovered, neglected to alert regulators immediately.

“I asked (Curtis Mable) to convey to their management the importance of notifying the RRC as soon as possible of releases, especially into waterways,” the incident report read. The commission issued a verbal warning to JGE and decided not to pursue penalties following a post-cleanup inspection.

Two months passed before Thomas was made aware of the oil spill on his property and the creek running through it. Having spent a career in the fossil fuel industry, he knew that accidents happen. What bothered Thomas was being kept in the dark.

“If there’s a spill on my property, I ought to know,” he said in September. “There’s leaks, and then there’s leaks into a running creek.”

According to state law, Thomas should have been informed by JGE no later than two weeks after the spill was detected.

Palacios, the Commission Shift executive director, said the railroad commission’s verbal warning to JGE was insufficient for deterring future violations and a typical response from the agency.

“The fact that the railroad commission sees a verbal, ‘make sure you don't do it again,’ as coming into compliance is a serious problem, and that needs reform,” Palacios said. “They should not be turning a blind eye to the deliberate disregard of its own rules.”

Railroad commission spokesman R.J. DeSilva said the state agency fulfilled its duty to protect the environment and public safety.

“We do so through inspections, investigations and responding to complaints to ensure operators are in compliance or come into compliance with RRC rules. We have done so with JGE, and one example is the spill (on Thomas’ property),” DeSilva said in a statement. “The RRC investigated the spill in the creek in Gregg County last year and notified the operator to clean up the spill. We followed up to ensure the operator did the required cleanup.”

A JGE employee provided photographic evidence in September 2024 of three other pipeline leaks the employee said were not being properly dealt with.

Meanwhile, alleged discrimination against American and female workers at the Longview Gas Plant spurred the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to file a case against JGE late last year, according to a copy of the investigation.

“(JGE) needs to be stopped,” said Wright, the former administrative assistant.

With or without regulatory action against JGE, plant workers were mystified by how JGE Midstream managed to survive this long in the first place. Workers intimately familiar with company finances said the Longview Gas Plant lost millions during the past three years because of repeated maintenance issues.

“They’ve never made a profit,” one employee said.

Instead, the employees said the plant’s massive flare was burning gas the facility could no longer process, likening the scene to dollar bills going up in smoke.