Warning of Arco Spill Ignored by Employees

Employees of the Atlantic Richfield Co. refinery in Carson disregarded and then turned off an alarm warning of an oily waste spill into a county sewer system that eventually caused the discharge of millions of gallons of inadequately treated sewage into the Pacific Ocean, it was learned Friday.

Officials of the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts said that, according to an Arco report, an assistant operator and his shift supervisor believed the warning signal at 2:30 a.m. May 31 was a false alarm and did not bother to check it out. For the next 1 1/2 hours, the refinery pumped an estimated 1 million gallons of oily waste into the sewers.

When the waste reached a nearby sewage treatment plant in Carson at 4:30 a.m., an alarm was triggered there, and sanitation workers shut down the plant’s secondary treatment system. The sanitation workers feared an explosion if the oily wastes were mixed in the secondary treatment area where pure oxygen is used in the treatment process.

350-Million Gallon Discharge

The treatment plant serves a wide area of the South Bay and other portions of Los Angeles County. The shutdown of the secondary system lasted 1 1/2 days and resulted in the discharge of 350 million gallons of inadequately treated waste into the Pacific Ocean at White Point on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

“It’s pretty flagrant when we have a situation where the (refinery’s) alarm did sound, the next-level supervisor was contacted (by the assistant operator) and they dismissed the alarm without taking the trouble to check,” said Charles Carry, chief engineer and general manager of the sanitation districts. “It would have been very simple. . . . I’m pretty upset about it. It is flat-out inexcusable.”

Sanitation officials also said Arco had illegally bypassed its own oily waste treatment system and had pumped untreated waste directly into the sewers.

The new disclosures come at a time when Carry said a decision is near on whether to ask the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to prosecute Arco because of a series of waste-water discharge violations over the past 1 1/2 years.

“They have a history of noncompliance that would have led them to be taken to the D.A. shortly anyway,” said Jay Kremer, head of the sanitation districts’ industrial waste section. Since January, 1985, the refinery has violated sanitation district rules at least a dozen times, he said.

Arco’s record “doesn’t stack up very well compared to most of the refineries,” Kremer said. Prior to 1985, he said the refinery’s record was “exemplary.”

Arco spokesman Al Greenstein said Friday that the oil company has completed repairs on its permanent sewer discharge line. The problems arose when a temporary line was in use. “Everything seems to be working well,” Greenstein said.

No Comment on Incident

Greenstein said he could not comment on why the alarm was disregarded. But according to a June 9 report from Arco to the sanitation districts, a refinery worker called his shift foreman to report the alarm when it first sounded. However, the worker told the foreman that it was “unimportant” because there had been several false alarms during the previous two weeks.

Arco acknowledged in the report that the alarm “apparently signaled the beginning of the . . . incident.”

Carry said that if there were previous false alarms, they had nothing to do with the cause of the spill. “When the other false alarms (occurred), they weren’t pumping down a tank (of oily wastes directly into the sewer) and therefore their concern should have been much greater. They knew this was an unusual procedure. . . . I’d be ultra-careful. They weren’t.”