Image copyright
Family handout
The former owners of an oil refinery in Pembroke will have to pay a £5m fine after four contractors were killed in an explosion at its site back in 2011.
Dennis Riley, 52, Robert Broome, 48, Andrew Jenkins, 33, and Julie Jones, 54, had been tasked with draining a chemical storage tank at the then Chevron Oil Refinery when flammable gases inside it ignited.
A fifth employee, Andrew Phillips, was also caught in the resulting fireball but survived with life-changing burns.
Chevron will have to pay the fine and court costs of £1m as part of a deal it struck with Valero Energy UK Limited, which bought the site shortly after the disaster.
Specialist cleaning company B&A Contracts, which employed Mr Broome and Mr Jenkins, was fined £120,000 and ordered to pay cost of £40,000 after admitting health and safety breaches.
Speaking just after the eight year anniversary of the tragedy, the judge Mr Justice Lewis said no fine could "reflect the value of someone's life" but it was right that the companies were sentenced according to the law.
"The tragedy has had a devastating impact on the families of those who died," he said.
The five workers caught in the explosion had been instructed to pump residue from a tank which normally contained a mix of amine and diesel, but was going through a cleaning process.
Last month the court heard the atmosphere inside it had been slowly "contaminated" with flammable "light hydrocarbons" as a result of changes to the refining process many years before.
While the company was aware of the potentially dangerous build-up when it changed its process in 1998, it failed to put in place measures to address the problem.
The court previously heard the tank had been wrongly classified as safe, while messages and tests that could have potentially prevented the disaster were lost in communication.