Shortly after midnight on Nov. 19, 2023, while a processing unit at the Marathon Martinez Renewable Fuels refinery was starting up for the first time, hydrogen and diesel leaking from an overheated metal tube ignited into a massive blaze that engulfed California refinery worker Jerome Serrano, leaving the father of four in a months-long fight for his life.

Now Serrano’s co-workers as a California refinery workers have been locked out of their jobs at the refinery northeast of San Francisco after striking to improve what they describe as dangerous conditions caused by understaffing, relentless overtime shifts and a contract with fewer benefits than those offered to their union colleagues at other refineries.

Marathon Petroleum, the largest U.S. oil refiner, stopped operating processing units at its Martinez facility in 2020 while its plan to convert the facility from a petroleum refinery to one for renewable fuels underwent environmental review. Two years later, after county supervisors signed off on the project in a unanimous decision, Marathon started retrofitting machinery in the 113-year-old plant, and began processing vegetable oil and animal fats into renewable fuels the next year.

As operators tried to get a renewable diesel hydroprocessing unit up and running, no one among the California refinery workers knew that a startup valve was open when it should have been closed. That allowed fuel combustion to continue to generate heat, testing the limits of a metal tube in the furnace. Field operators were summoned to close fuel gas valves that fed the furnace, but the tube became “dangerously hot,” federal investigators determined, and failed. The breached tube released 200,000 pounds of highly flammable renewable diesel and 2,000 pounds of hydrogen, which quickly ignited and nearly burned Serrano to death.

California refinery workers hoped a new contract would help prevent similar accidents in the future.

The National Oil Bargaining Program (NOBP) represents more than 200 United Steel Workers bargaining units in contract negotiations across the petroleum and renewables industry, and reached an agreement in February. Marathon was the lead company in national negotiations, so Martinez’s union representatives didn’t expect trouble bargaining terms for their refinery, said Jim Payne, secretary-treasurer for USW Local 5.

Read the full article about understaffing and fatigue for refinery workers by Liza Gross at Inside Climate News.