Mobil Fire Reminds City of Giant in Its Midst
The heart of an industrial giant still beats incongruously in Torrance, a city that has been taken over by homes, retail stores and high-tech businesses.
If anyone in Torrance had forgotten the existence of the giant, a reminder came Tuesday evening when Mobil Oil Corp.’s refinery exploded in flames, injuring two workers and shattering windows in nearby houses. Investigators said Thursday they still have not determined the cause of the explosion.
Industrial mishaps were once more common in a town that prided itself on being “The Modern Industrial City.” But three years ago it gave itself a new name: “The Balanced City: Industrial, Residential, Commercial.”
That balance has shifted dramatically in recent years in favor of residential and commercial development, leaving Mobil’s 730-acre refinery on 190th Street the only substantial smokestack plant remaining in a town once dominated by steel and oil companies.
When the refinery exploded, it did so amid housing tracts that flank it on the north and south. The advance of homes and “clean” businesses--such as Del Amo Fashion Center and the U. S. headquarters for both Honda and Toyota--has increasingly made Mobil a target for public complaints and government regulation.
“It’s a remnant from the past and the way Torrance was originally developed,” Mayor Katy Geissert said. “Some aspects of the operation will continue to make it an incompatible use. Whether that’s Mobil’s fault or the city’s fault is hard to say.
“The refinery is there and the city has changed around it.”
Mobil officials said they have no intention of leaving and are making substantial improvements at the plant to meet increasingly stringent environmental standards.
And city officials point to the positive side of Mobil’s presence. About 800 people are regularly employed at the plant, not including construction crews that are making the improvements there. The company is probably the biggest tax generator in the city, according to Assistant Finance Director Dick Rankin, with annual payments totaling about $3 million. And landscaping along 190th Street and Crenshaw Boulevard has helped to improve the street-level aesthetics of the plant, Geissert said.
Built in 1929, the refinery produces about 70,000 barrels of fuel a day. Crude oil from the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles Harbor area flows through two main pipelines to Torrance, where it is processed into gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation fuel.
Tuesday’s fire was at least the sixth incident at the plant in the last decade to leave its mark on the surrounding community. Two workers and a passer-by were killed in a fire at the plant in December, 1979, and the windows of neighboring homes were shattered three months later in another refinery explosion.
Other mishaps have closed roads, showered cars with oil and covered houses with soot.
The refinery has been fined a total of $39,550 for 39 air-quality violations in the past 35 months, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Violations have ranged from leaky valves to faults in the plant’s vapor recovery system, AQMD spokesman Ron Ketcham said.
Odors from the plant have led to public-nuisance complaints from the agency six times since January, 1986. The most recent citation was issued Nov. 11.
Mobil also has been under scrutiny for leakage of refined fuels into the ground. Even as the flames soared more than 200 feet from the refinery Tuesday night, the City Council was meeting in executive session to discuss suing Mobil for underground contamination in the city’s Industrial Redevelopment Project area. No action was taken.
Mobil officials have denied that they are responsible for polluting the earth in the redevelopment zone, roughly a mile southeast of the refinery.
The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board is investigating. A year and a half ago, the state board ordered 18 refineries to investigate the possibility of groundwater contamination, according to Dennis Dasker, a supervising engineer with the agency. Mobil found fuel in several wells on its property and has been ordered to bore more holes to see whether the contamination has spread from the refinery grounds, Dasker said.
The pollution discovered so far has “no immediate impact on water quality or health,” Dasker said, because it has not reached deep underground aquifers that are a source of drinking water.
Residents are also concerned about noise, which has increased in the past year as construction crews work on a $200-million project to reduce emissions of sulfur oxide into the atmosphere.
Analyst John Karcic of Torrance’s Environmental Quality Division said his office gets about two complaints a month for excessive noise and said the problem is not considered significant for a company of Mobil’s size.
Some neighbors said they have given up on fighting for improvements.
“We can’t do anything. We just take it,” said Irene Ordaz, 57.
Ordaz and her husband, Ruben, are leaders in the Pueblo, a Latino community along Del Amo Boulevard which predates the refinery.
“This morning when we got up it was smelling like gas like you can’t believe,” Irene Ordaz said Wednesday at her home just 50 feet from the refinery grounds. “But they just fine them $1,000 and we have to put up with it. A thousand for them (Mobil) is like a dollar for us. The AQMD, that is just for them; it is not for us.”
Community criticism of the AQMD reached a peak in 1985, when it failed to carry through with a threat to close down the refinery because of a faulty pollution control system.
A criminal investigation against Mobil executives was also dropped at that time, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, because air quality officials had mishandled crucial evidence.
City Councilman Mark Wirth said he is frustrated that the air quality district has not been tougher. “We talk to them and it just doesn’t seem like we get much of a response,” he said. Wirth suggested that higher fines might help curb pollution.
Locals may not love Mobil as a neighbor, but Mayor Geissert said they should consider what could be built in its place. “I sometimes play the game of ‘What if?’ ” Geissert said. “If they decided to leave, it boggles my mind to think of what could be developed there. It could be a whole new city.”
