State Orders Tests on Oil Pool Under Refinery

A water testing program has found pools of petroleum products beneath almost all of the refineries in Los Angeles County, state officials said Tuesday.

The most serious finding, the officials said, was the discovery of a layer of petroleum products as much as 25 feet thick at a depth of 75 feet below the Mobil refinery in Torrance. It has almost certainly seeped beneath adjacent residential areas, the officials said.

Calling the pool in Torrance “a significant potential threat to public health and the environment,” Angelo Bellomo, chief of the Southern California section of the state’s Toxic Substances Control Division, ordered the oil company to begin testing for vapor levels to see if there is any danger of explosion or fire.

“The presence of vapors associated with liquid hydrocarbons represents a potential fire, explosion and health hazard,” Bellomo said. However, there is no immediate danger, he said.

Drilling to Begin

Mobil officials said the company will begin drilling outside refinery property boundaries to find out how far the underground plume may have spread. They said the drilling would begin after Torrance officials issue the needed permits.

“They are going to drill right in front of my house,” said Ruben Ordaz, president of the Pueblo Homeowners Assn. “We’re concerned. We don’t know what it is going to mean.”

Mobil spokesman Jim Carbonetti said that vapor levels in wells dug within the refinery grounds are safe. Carbonetti said the testing program already has cost Mobil about $1 million.

In a related development, Jim Ross, state senior water resource control engineer, said that Mobil, which acknowledged finding leaked oil five years before reporting it to state water authorities in 1985, may have violated state hazardous material discharge reporting laws, which require immediate notification. Carbonetti said Tuesday that the company had no immediate response.

The exact cause of the leaks is not known and may never be known, according to documents provided by Mobil to state officials. Chemical analysis showed that some of the hydrocarbons are 20 years old and many of the pipelines and tanks have long since been repaired or replaced, Mobil said.

Recovery of the product, however, may enable the oil company to recoup part of the expenses, according to Ric Notini, program manager of the state Toxic Substances Control Division. Recovery, he explained, involves drilling wells, pumping out the oil and then sending it back through the refinery. The pool of leaked petroleum beneath the Chevron USA refinery in El Segundo, discovered in 1985, now is providing the refinery 5,000 barrels of petroleum a month, Notini said. “It’s a money maker for them,” he said.

The water testing was ordered in February, 1985, by the Los Angeles office of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board after Chevron USA found a pool of gasoline under the El Segundo refinery. Fuel vapors at a few nearby residences were reported at concentrations high enough to trigger evacuation because of the danger of fire, Notini said.

No similar levels have been found so far at other refineries, state officials said.

State officials discovered similar pools of petroleum product beneath all 14 of the other refineries where the tests have been completed. The four refineries where no leaks were found have been directed to expand their testing, according to Dennis Leonard, an associate hazardous waste specialist for the state Toxic Substance Control Division.

Except for the Mobil and Chevron refineries, none of the other leaks threaten residential areas, according to Ross of the water quality board.

Two of the leaks, however, have sent petroleum products under neighboring industrial areas, Ross said. He identified the two leaks as located at Edgington Oil Co., of Long Beach and Golden West Refining Co. of Santa Fe Springs.