Bechtel shares findings of tragic accident at Port Arthur LNG facility
The following message was sent to Bechtel colleagues on Tuesday, October 7, 2025, co-signed by Craig Albert, President and Chief Operating Officer & Paul Marsden, President, Energy:
Colleagues,
Five months ago, we shared tragic news that shook the entire Bechtel community to its core. On April 29, at 1:44 a.m., a five-person crew at the Port Arthur LNG facility was performing tank work at elevation when the climbing formwork system on which they were standing gave way. Three of our colleagues, Reginald Magee, Felipe Mendez, and Felix Lopez Sr., lost their lives, while two others were injured.
The overwhelming sense of shock and grief we felt in that moment hasn’t faded. As we said at the time, ensuring every colleague returns home safely at the end of each day has always been—and will always be—our highest calling. Our goal at Bechtel is zero workplace incidents, and anything short of that is unacceptable.
In the wake of the incident, we committed to understanding how this devastating loss could happen. We’ve been cooperating fully with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and we welcome the results of their investigation. In addition to cooperating with OSHA, we carried out our own internal investigation, and we promised to share our findings publicly.
This report provides a detailed account of what went wrong, along with the actions we are taking to address our shortcomings. As you will see, there was no single, isolated cause of the incident—we identified multiple contributing factors.
One of the most important takeaways from our review is the role that safety culture played—and, in some cases, failed to play. Safety culture isn’t the same everywhere. It can shift from project to project, crew to crew, and even task to task. In reviewing the incident, we found breakdowns in oversight and supervision, where moments to step in and take corrective action were missed.
It is up to our leaders to stay connected to and continually assess the health of our safety culture across every level of the organization, and to take deliberate action to intervene and ensure Bechtel’s strong, company-wide safety values are consistently adopted and reinforced across the business. In doing so, we can strengthen the proactive identification of life-critical risks by work crews and front-line supervisors during daily work planning. We can also promote strict adherence to life-critical safety processes by encouraging real-time, peer-to-peer interventions—prompting crews to pause and reset, seek necessary input, and correct unsafe conditions.
This kind of in-the-moment engagement—where stopping work to reassess becomes instinctive and universally supported—must become the norm across all project and office sites, building a strong culture from management to the workface aligned with our values and expectations. Ensuring this happens is not optional; it is our responsibility as company leaders, and we must make it happen.
The purpose of sharing our findings is to promote transparency, accountability, and learning, helping Bechtel—and the wider industry—anticipate risks and act proactively on safety. The findings and the actions outlined in this report are concrete steps toward that goal.
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