(Reuters) - A female contract worker was fatally injured on Friday while working on a construction project at ExxonMobil Corp’s refinery in Beaumont, Texas, a company spokeswoman said.
ExxonMobil spokeswoman Charlotte Huffaker said the woman was employed by Echo Maintenance LLC, which does construction for refineries and chemical plants.
Sources familiar with plant operations said the worker died when a pipe fell and struck her on the head.
Production was not affected by Friday’s accident, the sources said. The refinery is already operating at 110,000 barrels per day (bpd) below its 362,300 bpd capacity because the smaller of two crude distillation units (CDUs) remains shut following a Tuesday fire.
The 110,000 bpd CDU sustained heavy damage in the Tuesday morning blaze that caused no injuries.
A spokeswoman at Echo’s Port Arthur, Texas, headquarters said the company had no immediate comment.
The woman was working a project to build a SCANfinig unit, which removes sulfur from gasoline to comply ultra-low sulfur gasoline standards, the sources said. SCAN stands for Selective Cat Naphtha hydrofining.
The worker was 31 years old, according to the sources. She was struck by a 24-inch (61-cm) pipe.
In May 2016, a contract worker was struck in the head by a pipe on a construction project at the Beaumont refinery and died.
Reporting by Erwin Seba; editing by Susan Thomas, G Crosse
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