Forceful and unequivocal accusations by the judge when closing the investigation initiated three and a half years ago to clarify the causes of the explosion in one of the reactors of the Iqoxe company in the Tarragona chemical park. The accident, according to the magistrate the “most serious in the history of the chemical industry in Europe”, was caused by deficiencies in safety, with systematic failures to make production and business profits prevail.
According to the judge, there was a negligent action, with the top managers at that time in Iqoxe not only as the most knowledgeable about the situation. She maintains that the industrial activity “would not meet the safety requirements that an activity of this danger demands” and alerts that the number of employees was “insufficient to carry out the production process with the proper safety guarantees”.
The magistrate adds that production needs, in order to obtain maximum benefit, have always taken precedence over the safety and protection of workers. The judge maintains after her investigation that she “progressively expanded production without considering safety requirements.”
Two employees died in the explosion and a neighbor also died when an iron plate from the reactor hit the floor where he lived, almost three kilometers from Iqoxe.
Thirteen more people were injured, ten employees and three outside the industry, and the explosion caused damage outside the chemical estate, in an unprecedented incident in Tarragona.
The head of the investigative court No. 1 of Tarragona prosecutes three former managers for all this, with José Luis Morlanes, then general director, at the head, for crimes of serious negligence resulting in death and injuries, against the right of workers and for damage.
The accident was very serious but it could have been much worse, according to the judge, as various experts in industrial safety had already warned before. The magistrate warned of a “situation of serious risk for people and the population” when a warehouse with 138 tons of propylene oxide was affected, which was “at serious risk of exploding and producing a domino effect with the dangerous substances stored in Iqoxe and in other adjacent chemical plants.
The list of accusations is long and compelling, some of them extremely serious, sustained by the judge over eighty pages. It is the step prior to the opening of the oral trial in the Tarragona Court against the three former directors and the company Iqoxe itself as its own legal personality. Before, the public prosecutor, the twelve particular accusations and two popular ones will have to present their accusatory writings. The defenses of the accused, who during the three long years that the judicial investigation has lasted have tried to lengthen the process as long as possible, with the invaluable initial help of the outbreak of the pandemic, can present their appeals.
Except for a major surprise, in addition to Morlanes, the former director of the damaged plant, in the municipality of La Canonja, Juan Manuel Rodríguez Prats, and the security director, Gerardo Adrio, will also sit on the defendants’ bench.
The trial will foreseeably be long and highly technically complex, with the added difficulty that the enormous explosion destroyed the black box of the affected reactor and two of the top managers of the plant died in the incident. Iqoxe has always defended its performance and has denied accusations of prioritizing production and profit while failing to comply with security requirements.
