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BP’s refining subsidiary was released today from criminal probation related to a 2005 explosion in Texas City that killed 15 workers.

The company has addressed the most serious safety defi­ciencies exposed by the accident and satisfied the terms of a felony plea agreement to settle charges that it failed to protect workers from known risks, a U.S. Justice Department spokesman said.

The move closes a contro­versial chapter for the company, but it leaves an array of worker-safety issues unre­solved. BP is still nego­ti­ating over more than 400 addi­tional viola­tions brought against its Texas City refinery sepa­rately from the criminal case.

Following the explosion, the U.S. Occu­pa­tional Safety and Health Admin­is­tration and BP reached a settlement requiring the company to address safety issues at the refinery. Fixing those problems became one of the Justice Department’s condi­tions for settling felony charges relating to the explosion and for ending the three-year probation period.

In late 2009, however, after a series of inspec­tions, OSHA deter­mined that BP had not addressed many of its safety lapses and levied 270 addi­tional viola­tions and a $87.4 million fine. It also hit the company with another 439 addi­tional “egre­gious and willful” safety viola­tions at the refinery that were not a component of the criminal case.

At issue then was whether the company had violated some of the most important terms of its probation even after it was given a second chance. In 2010, BP settled with OSHA, paying the agency $50.6 million and committing to making substantive safety changes by the court-set sunset of its probation period today (March 12).

A Justice Department spokesman said BP has met its oblig­a­tions for probation, including addressing the 270 viola­tions. The remaining 400 or so OSHA viola­tions, however, were not specific to the Texas City agreement.

“These viola­tions were unre­lated to the 2005 settlement agreement and did not in the Department’s view rise to criminal conduct,” said Wyn Horn­buckle, an agency spokesman, in a statement to ProP­ublica. “The Department did not seek any extension or revo­cation of BP’s criminal probation.”

The reso­lution of those remaining viola­tions will be dealt with admin­is­tra­tively, by OSHA, Horn­buckle said, and not by the courts.

As the probation expired, confusion remained about exactly what improve­ments BP had made at its refineries. According to the 2010 agreement with OSHA, BP pledged to address the risk of cata­strophic chemical releases and to install new protective equipment and instrument systems across the sprawling refinery’s 28 units.

It was not clear how much progress the company had made, however, and BP spokesman Daren Beaudo char­ac­terized the OSHA issues as Unresolved.

“We continue to work with OSHA to resolve these issues,” Beaudo wrote in an email. BP declined to say whether it had made any of the specific improve­ments listed in its 2010 settlement agreement, or to say how much money it had invested at the Texas City plant to meet the terms of its agreement with OSHA.

A spokes­woman for OSHA said the agency remained in nego­ti­a­tions with the company.

In an email exchange, OSHA told ProP­ublica that the agency could not provide copies of any of the quar­terly progress reports that BP had agreed to submit, and that it was “unable” to specify how many of its outstanding viola­tions BP had addressed.

On March 23, 2005, a facility used to distill gasoline and boost its octane content was over­filled by BP workers, spewing a geyser of flam­mable liquid into the air. The subse­quent explosion destroyed an office trailer nearby, killed 15 workers, and sent nearly 200 more to area hospitals.

Like the inves­ti­ga­tions into BP’s Deep­water Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, a series of reports analyzing the refinery disaster found that the company had failed to follow basic steps to avert a disaster, had not installed or main­tained equipment that would have helped prevent the leak and the explosion, and generally had a poor safety approach.

A 2010 inves­ti­gation by ProP­ublica found that in the years before the explosion, BP had been repeatedly warned that its facil­ities were in need of repair, and the company had declined to replace ailing equipment — including the unit that failed the day of the explosion — in order to cut costs.

Docu­ments obtained by ProP­ublica showed that an internal BP report shortly before the disaster said that employees at the plant worked with “an excep­tional degree of fear.” The report warned that the plant might “kills (sic) someone in the next 12–18 months.”

The Texas refinery, which produces about 3 percent of the country’s gasoline, continued to have problems after the explosion. Several more workers died in acci­dents, and in 2010, the plant was found emitting a huge cloud of unper­mitted toxic emis­sions.

After the toxic release, the Texas Commission on Envi­ron­mental Quality (TCEQ), Texas’s chief envi­ron­mental regu­lator, charged the company with emis­sions reporting viola­tions and alleged it had violated the terms of its probation with the federal government. BP settled that case, as well as an another similar emis­sions violation, with Texas in late 2011.

That left the criminal probation period and the outstanding OSHA viola­tions as the final chapters in the Texas City saga.

BP has endeavored to keep the Texas City accident separate from claims and ongoing inves­ti­ga­tions into its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. As recently as two weeks ago, the company’s lawyers argued in court that past acci­dents should have no bearing on a trial to decide liability for the Deep­water Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers.

BP sought to strike portions of testimony about Texas City and other past inci­dents from its former CEO, Tony Hayward, in depo­si­tions that would be admitted to the court.

BP announced last year that it would sell its Texas City refinery along with another facility outside Los Angeles. The company said this week it has suitors and expects to complete a sale by year’s end.