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That is not what happened soon after 1pm on March 23 last year. Workers restarting an octane-boosting isomerisation unit overfilled a distillation tower with a flammable hydrocarbon liquid.

The liquid overwhelmed a 50-year-old back-up system, sending out a geyser of vapour and liquid. Alarms failed, and a huge explosion was heard five miles away.

The blast killed 15 employees, most of whom were working in trailer offices that were too close to the unit, and injured at least 170 others, many seriously. BP has been hammered ever since. In September last year it was fined a record $21 million for 300 “willful” violations of safety regulations. The US Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation and the Environmental Protection Agency is considering a civil action. A serious oil spill at BP’s Prudhoe Bay facility in Alaska in March and a $2.4 million fine for safety violations at the company’s refinery in Ohio the next month made matters worse.

This week a report by the US Chemical Safety Board cited the latest in a series of embarrassing internal BP documents indicating that the company knew it had serious safety problems well before the Texas City explosion. “What BP experienced was a perfect storm, where ageing infrastructure, overzealous cost-cutting, inadequate design and risk blindness all converged,” Carolyn Merritt, the chairman of the safety board, said.

“It’s not what they need,” Mr Coon observed, with calculated understatement, of Ms Rowe’s court case. BP did not help itself by seeking, initially, to blame low-level workers for the disaster. But, given the manifest weakness of its position, it quickly changed course and since has been engaged in a huge damage limitation exercise.

It has apologised and accepted full responsibility, although it denies that budget cuts were the root cause. It has published the unflattering results of its own investigation into the accident, and it is funding an independent review of its safety culture led by James Baker, the former US Secretary of State, which will report this month. It has started a $1 billion, five-year programme to improve the Texas City refinery.

Above all, the company has moved rapidly to settle hundreds of personal-injury lawsuits before they reach court, starting with the most serious and allocating $1.6 billion for the purpose. Tony Buzbee, a lawyer representing 160 plaintiffs, said that he had never seen a big corporation move so fast, adding that his clients were all “very, very happy with the result”. The quid pro quo, of course, is that the plantiffs sign a confidentiality order. Curiously, Texas City itself has not turned on BP. It helps that the company gives generously to civic causes (a local college raised eyebrows recently by naming BP its “corporate hero”). This is almost a company town, so criticising BP might be rash. Matt Doyle, the Mayor of Texas City, was lavish in his praise of BP’s efforts to upgrade the refinery. “I will stake my reputation on that [soon] being the safest plant in America, and maybe in the world,” he told The Times.

For others in the town, the disaster — and BP’s eagerness to put the whole sorry saga behind it — has proved an unexpected windfall. The number of claims far exceeds the number of the injured.

“When things like this happen, people jump on the bandwagon and get what they can,” William Sorrell, 45, a burly firefighter, said. “It’s changing the whole atmosphere around here. People earning $30,000 a year are getting $1.2 million (payouts). We are getting people being extravagant, overextending themselves, buying cars, jewellery, frivolous things.”

Shawn Roper, 33, a boilermaker, said that he knew “people who were just driving by and got money”.

Mr Roper was working close to the explosion. He readily acknowledged that he was not hurt, but two months ago he decided to slap in a lawsuit anyway — “for the sake of my kids”.

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