Cars Near Refinery Sprayed With Solvent : No Clean Finish for Chevron’s Snafu

Chevron’s good-neighbor policy is getting a stiff workout these days in El Segundo, where the oil company’s refinery observed Presidents’ Day in unneighborly fashion.

It spewed a cleaning solvent into the air and deposited the stuff on perhaps 2,000 of its neighbors’ automobiles.

Compared to some things oil refineries can do to the neighbors, this could be considered minor. There was no health threat, regulators say. Ground water was not contaminated. There was no out-and-out destruction of property.

But this is Southern California, where a citizen is no better than his car. With no discernible legal leg to stand on, Chevron is fighting an uphill battle to satisfy a crowd of victims who want a complete return to their former status.

“I want my car the way it was before they sprayed it,” fumed a Hughes Aircraft engineer.

That might be impossible. But Chevron has contritely rounded up specialists from Texas and Pasadena to perform elaborate cleaning jobs on the damaged cars, most of which belong to workers at Hughes’ nearby Electro Optical Data Systems Group.

The work is going on under tents erected at the refinery. A shuttle service now runs all day between the refinery and Hughes, delivering Hughes workers and their bespeckled cars for cleaning appointments and then returning the employees to their defense contractor jobs.

Chevron officials describe the work as auto detailing by hand that would cost $200 on the street. Alternatively, the workers can just take the $200 and go to Disneyland--if they release the oil company from further responsibility.

“We hope that everybody will ultimately be as satisfied as they can be under the circumstances,” said Rod Spackman, a Chevron spokesman.

But it’s hard to make a balm out of N-methyl pyrrolidone, especially when it drapes people’s cars with thousands of little brown polka-dots whose susceptibility to mere washing, waxing and buffing is a matter of some dispute.

“It can’t be buffed out,” declared Cheryl Donley, a body shop assistant at Daniel Chevrolet in Marina del Rey, which tried to fix one of the Hughes cars. “We tried a rubbing compound and a buffing machine. It has to be sanded off and repainted.”

Four in Dispute

One owner, a Hughes engineer named Henry, hasn’t decided whether to take Chevron up on its offer to detail his Chevy. Asking anonymity, he said, “It’s a fiasco.”

An anonymous letter from another Hughes worker demands: “When are they going to start offering the $3,000 paint jobs required to fix the problem?”

Ken Zion, a consultant who teaches auto collision repair at El Camino College, warns: “Any substance that doesn’t evaporate quickly and sits on a car in the sun can wreak havoc on a paint job. Not only can it leave a ring, but it can deteriorate the paint itself.”

Objecting to the anonymous gripes--Hughes workers are not eager to be identified as the sort who talk with newspaper reporters--Spackman said that only about four of 1,000 cars detailed so far are still in dispute. In several cases, he said, Chevron--under the close watch of its on-the-scene insurance adjusters--has agreed to pay for paint jobs.

Chevron says it consulted with the manufacturer of the chemical--known commercially as M-Pyrol--and used some damaged Chevron cars as guinea pigs for the detailing treatment. First in line was the one used by the superintendent of the refinery operating division where the accident occurred.

“We thought there was justice in that,” Spackman said. He quoted a letter from a happy Manhattan Beach customer of Chevron’s car wash who complimented the oil company’s efforts and said, “The experience was impressive.”

The lesson, Chevron concedes, is not to do this in the first place. A rupture in a tube in a heat exchanger caused steam to mix with the cleaning solvent, and the mixture dissipated into the air for about 10 minutes at midday on Feb. 20.

Chevron’s huge 250,000 barrel-a-day refinery accounts for 25% of the refining capacity in the region and is a huge supplier of gasoline. Thus, it is statistically probable that Chevron gasoline enabled 500 of the damaged cars to get into position to be splattered in the first place.

Meanwhile, officials at Hughes--where Chevron has set up shop in the cafeteria to take complaints--say they are “closely monitoring” the situation lest taxpayers get billed for lost work time as the defense workers travel back and forth from the car wash.

Times staff writer Ralph Vartabedian contributed to this story.