• The explosion in 2015 at a Leeden National Oxygen lab killed a 30-year-old chemist
• The blaze also injured other employees
• The company and its chief confessed to several failings, including not putting in place precautions

SINGAPORE — A gas manufacturing firm’s safety lapses led to a laboratory fire at its Jurong factory more than five years ago, killing a 30-year-old chemist and injuring other employees.

The firm, Leeden National Oxygen (Lnox), was on Tuesday (Jan 26) fined S$340,000. Its chief executive officer Steven Tham Weng Cheong was handed a S$45,000 fine. 

The firm and Tham pleaded guilty last month to one charge each of failing to take the necessary steps to ensure the safety and health of employees under the Workplace Safety and Health Act. 

The chemist who died, Lim Siaw Chian, then 30, was carrying out gas analysis on a cylinder on Oct 12, 2015, when a blast rocked the specialty gas centre quality control lab at the factory.

Multiple explosions went off at Lnox’s premises along Tanjong Kling Road. 

Based on court documents, the initial explosion injured two of Lim’s colleagues who were performing similar tasks at the lab. It also killed Lim, who had just returned from maternity leave. 

The resulting blaze injured seven other employees. Their injuries included abrasions, ruptures of the outer membranes of the eye, and brain haemorrhage.

Lim was last seen touching a regulatory valve assembly, which controls gas flow.

The company and Tham confessed to several failings, including not putting in place precautions that included ensuring unsafe, modified regulatory valve assemblies were not used when testing combustible gases.

The device that Lim last touched had an unqualified weld joint in it, which was not approved by a manufacturer. It resulted in the leakage of flammable gases such as methane and nitrogen. This, in turn, led to the gas cylinder exploding.

Investigations also showed that Lnox was not authorised to store petroleum and flammable material at the lab, but cylinders of combustible gases were kept there for easy access and retrieval during calibration or gas analysis.

A year before the fire broke out, an employee conducting a routine inspection had raised concerns over the facility’s gas leakage indicator lights because they were blinking occasionally without obvious triggers. They were deemed unreliable, should a gas leak occur.

The employee got a quotation from a contractor for his proposal to revamp the gas detection system in May 2015, but the work was not done. The employee was told that the firm had no budget to perform such work and the proposal would be delayed until the following year.

The accident happened before the firm put up its budget proposal for the following year.

The firm and Tham also failed to review safety procedures after the merger of two entities, Leeden and National Oxygen, led to Lnox’s formation in October 2014. They also failed to announce and appoint a staff member to assume the safety portfolio after an employee originally performing that task resigned in August 2015.

In passing sentence, District Judge Adam Nakhoda said that the lapses by the firm and Tham put a large number of employees at risk. He noted, though, that the firm has since rolled out the necessary precautions.

Lnox could have been fined up to S$500,000, while Tham could have been jailed up to two years and fined up to S$200,000.

Aside from them, Gary Choo Pu Chang, a former director at the firm, has been charged with carrying out a negligent act that endangered his safety or health, or that of others. His case is still pending.