Torrance Rejects Consultants’ Report on Mobil as ‘Flawed’

The Torrance City Council unanimously refused Tuesday to accept an outside consultant’s study that blamed lax management for safety problems at the troubled Mobil Oil refinery.

After an extended discussion, the council decided not to accept the $88,000 study by Gage-Babcock & Associates and Mittelhauser Corp. until errors in the report are corrected and additional information is provided.

The study, begun in July and released late last month, said the number of safety incidents at the Mobil refinery has been too high. Explosions, fires and accidents have claimed three lives at the refinery in the last two years.

The consultants blamed the problems on poor-quality work and lax management, including failure to discipline workers violating safety rules and company policy.

Shortly after the report was released, Mobil refinery manager Wyman D. Robb accused the consultants of doing “a sloppy job.” And in a written rebuttal last week, Robb said the report was riddled with a “startling number of basic errors.”

Robb said the consultants never asked for complete information on disciplinary actions and did not take into consideration a major construction project at Mobil in comparing the number of safety incidents with those at other refineries.

Faced with evidence that the long-delayed study was rushed to completion, council members rejected City Manager LeRoy Jackson’s advice to accept the report as presented.

‘Report Was Flawed’

“We delayed acceptance until it is amended,” Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert explained later. “The report was flawed by discrepancies that need to be ironed out.”

Councilman Bill Applegate said the consultants had only added to the confusion surrounding the Mobil safety issue.

“They were the ones who compromised their standards because someone told them they had to do it by a certain date,” Applegate said later. “It doesn’t do a darn bit of good to get it out quick if it’s not correct.”

During the meeting, representatives of both consulting firms refused to accept any blame for the report’s flaws.

Council members pointedly noted the report’s failure to:

Provide accurate information on disciplinary actions against Mobil employees.

Note that a sharp increase in safety incidents at the refinery in 1987 occurred while a major construction project was under way.

Interview members or officials of labor unions at Mobil.

It was unclear how much the new work would cost or how long it would take to complete. Mobil, which gave the city the money to pay for the study, did not volunteer to pay for the extra work.

And the consultants’ comments during the council meeting only compounded their problems.

Applegate told the four representatives from the consulting firms that “it boggles my mind” to spend $88,000 on a report, have it question the Fire Department’s ability to control a major release of acutely toxic hydrofluoric acid at the refinery and then find out that the consultants never discussed the issue with fire officials.

Gage-Babcock official John Carlson admitted that “in the urgency to get the report by Dec. 30, we had not talked to the Fire Department like we should have.”

In the study, the consultants said they were “concerned about the adequacy” of city and Mobil fire units to control a major chemical release. “To our knowledge, neither the refinery fire brigade nor the Torrance Fire Department staff is trained in controlling (hydrofluoric acid) or other chemical releases,” it said.

However, Carlson offered a dramatically different assessment after meeting Monday with Torrance Fire Chief Scott Adams and learning for the first time about the city’s hazardous materials unit.

“The Fire Department is fully capable of handling or responding to a hydrofluoric acid release,” Carlson told council members. “We don’t have a big problem here.” He said the department is well-equipped to handle any hazardous material.

Chief Adams did not accept the revised view. “It may be going too far to state that we could handle any major release of hazardous material,” he said.

An excess of hydrofluoric acid in a refinery unit that produces unleaded gasoline caused an massive explosion and two-day fire at Mobil in November, 1987. An estimated 100 pounds of the acid was released in the explosion but did not escape the refinery grounds.

Councilman Dan Walker, the council’s harshest critic of Mobil and the author of an initiative to severely restrict the use and storage of hydrofluoric acid in the city, seized on the consultants’ apparent change of heart. “The credibility of the consultant in a major portion of the report went straight down the toilet,” he said.

Walker said he will begin gathering signatures on his initiative within 30 days.

“Mobil is going to have to wake up to the fact that the smartest thing they could do as a company is change processes from hydrofluoric acid to something else,” he said. “That’s what’s going to have to happen for this community to accept them as a neighbor.”

The continued use of hydrofluoric acid is the central issue in the debate over safety at the refinery. The acid forms a ground-hugging toxic gas and, even in minute concentrations, can be deadly if inhaled.

Mittelhauser Corp. representative Gary E. Pack told the council that the risk to Torrance residents from the use of the chemical at the refinery is “very small”--less than the risk of dying in a Los Angeles freeway accident.

That remark drew a sharp retort from resident Bernie Hollander, a retired chemical industry engineer, who accused the consultants of having a “cavalier attitude” about a potentially major problem.

“I can’t believe some of the things I’ve heard here tonight,” Hollander said, noting that there is enough hydrofluoric acid at the refinery to create a disaster similar to the methyl isocyanate accident at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, that claimed 3,000 lives in December, 1984.

“Are we faced with a potential Bhopal or 100 people with lung and eye irritation?” Hollander said. “There has to be some arithmetic to this.”

He called the consultants’ report “grossly inadequate” and said their “credibility is very much suspect.”

Greg Munakata, the refinery’s environmental and safety manager, told the council that “it is clear to everyone” that there were “considerable communication problems and misunderstandings.”

Munakata said Mobil and the consultants were responsible for the “information gaps.”

But the consultants refused to accept responsibility for the study’s flaws. Gage-Babcock’s Carlson said after the meeting: “We did not have time to do a fully satisfactory job.”

Council members told the consultants that they want errors in the report corrected, particularly a section that criticized Mobil for not taking disciplinary action against employees.

That conclusion was based on information about four disciplinary actions over a 10-year period. In fact, Mobil said, there were 165 disciplinary actions between 1978 and 1988. The consultants said they asked for the material but did not receive it.

Munakata said: “Mobil would have no advantage in withholding this information.”

Council members also want the report to include an assessment of Mobil’s plans for an emergency system that would rapidly transfer hydrofluoric acid to underground storage tanks if an accident occurred. The consultants said they were told of the system three days before their report was finished.

After acknowledging that they did not talk to officials of labor unions representing Mobil workers, the consultants were asked to again examine the issue of whether outside contractors are contributing to safety incidents at the refinery.