Suit Sheds Light on Tensions for Mobil’s Environmental Staff : Pollution: Legal documents show that ’85 raid on Torrance refinery by L.A. district attorney sent Mobil officials scurrying to remove air pollution documents from a plant in Bakersfield.

On July 18, 1985, top executives of Mobil Oil Corp. received an unpleasant surprise.

Without notice, the Los Angeles County district attorney swept into the oil giant’s refinery in Torrance, served a sweeping search warrant and emerged with boxes of documents pertaining to suspected air pollution violations.

Nothing like that had happened before to Mobil, according to Mobil statements in a wrongful firing case that were released in federal court here this week.

Criminal charges were never filed against Mobil as a result of the raid. However, senior Mobil officials began worrying that an installation in Bakersfield, where federal, state and local officials had been investigating air pollution, might soon be searched by environmental officials, the documents say.

Within a few days of the Torrance raid, Mobil officials engaged in frantic efforts to remove air pollution documents from the Bakersfield plant. Less than a week after Mobil sent documents to an outside lawyer, the federal Environmental Protection Agency did inspect the Bakersfield plant. Mobil was later cited for violating air quality standards there.

A central player in the Bakersfield case was Valcar Bowman, a Mobil official who opposed the transfer of the Bakersfield documents as unethical.

Bowman, 47, then the second-ranking environmental official for Mobil Chemical Co., lost his job in 1986 and now is suing, alleging that he was fired because he refused to participate in attempts to hide environmental problems at Bakersfield and other Mobil chemical plants. He is asking for compensation for his salary to retirement, fringe benefits, retirement pay and other damages.

The suit offers a look at tensions between Mobil attorneys and the company’s environmental officers.

Although the removal of documents from the Bakersfield plant is a central element of the suit, Bowman also is alleging that he got into trouble for objecting when Mobil attorneys changed his staff’s environmental reports, downplaying problems.

One memo from a Mobil lawyer said that Bowman’s reports, which discussed violations of environmental laws and regulations, should be kept from top executives as a way to shield them from liability.

Mobil said Bowman lost his job because of a cost-cutting program and denied that he was fired in retaliation for raising environmental concerns. The oil company said the changes its lawyers requested in the environmental reports were merely “semantic.”

Bowman, who was hired by Mobil in 1977, rose within the chemical subsidiary of the oil giant, becoming environmental control manager of Mobil Chemical Co. in 1984, moving from Houston to Princeton, N.J., to take a position as second-ranking official responsible for environmental concerns.

Bowman said in court papers that his career at Mobil ran into trouble soon after the 1985 raid on the Torrance refinery, which came in the midst of a protracted controversy between Mobil and the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

In that dispute, district officials were saying that Mobil in Torrance had knowingly polluted the air with health-threatening particulates at levels seven times the maximum allowed and intentionally withheld information that would have alerted air quality authorities to problems at the refinery.

In hearings on the case, Mobil officials testified it would have cost between $100,000 and $200,000 a day in lost production to close for repairs. By comparison, the maximum fine for violating air quality rules was $1,000 a day.

The AQMD turned the case over to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, which served the search warrant on the Torrance refinery.

The raid had a swift impact on Mobil, at corporate offices of Mobil Chemical and in Bakersfield, where federal, state and Kern County environmental officials were investigating the chemical plant for possible air pollution violations.

Even before the Torrance raid, Mobil Chemical officials had been worrying about damaging documents at the Bakersfield plant, where plastic foam is made for fast-food containers. About six weeks before the raid, Charles Lindberg, Mobil Chemical’s chief attorney, wrote a memo to Bowman saying that putting documents into the hands of an outside counsel would give them the protection of the attorney-client privilege.

Doing that would make it “more difficult for any governmental agency to obtain” the documents by subpoena than if Mobil kept them, Lindberg wrote.

The Bakersfield documents had not yet been turned over to an outside lawyer when the Torrance refinery was raided. The search threw that effort into high gear.

Within days of the raid in Torrance, Lindberg read about it with alarm, a Mobil brief says. “In all his years as an attorney at Mobil, (Lindberg) had never heard of such an unprecedented action against Mobil,” the document says.

Lindberg was concerned that “local or state regulatory officials” also might “summarily seize documents” pertaining to air pollution from the Bakersfield plant, where air emissions had been an issue for four years.

Mobil Chemical President A. E. Biggs also read about the Torrance raid, according to Mobil’s brief. He asked Lindberg to protect Mobil’s interests.

According to Bowman’s brief, two of Biggs’ subordinates said the chief executive gave an order to remove documents from the Bakersfield plant; Biggs said he learned of the effort later.

Whoever gave the order, U.S. District Judge Harold A. Ackerman, in refusing to dismiss Bowman’s suit on Dec. 11, described Mobil’s efforts to get the documents out of the plant and into the hands of an outside lawyer as “frantic.”

Mobil, however, denied that transferring the documents was intended to evade any investigation, saying that the transfer had been their plan for some time.

Ackerman contrasted Mobil’s explanation with the urgency of the company’s action after the July 18, 1985, search in Torrance.

He pointed out that, to deal with the document situation, Lindberg tracked down W. T. Colbert, Mobil Chemical’s chief environmental lawyer, at a bar association conference in Chicago, and began contacting Mobil officials in Bakersfield. He also reached Bowman, who was on an airplane, on July 24.

Bowman’s position is that he opposed the document transfer as “unethical” and “immoral” and that Mobil officials knew an inspection of the plant was imminent.

The Mobil brief says, however, that Bowman did participate in the transfers.

On July 30, the federal Environmental Protection Agency conducted an air quality emissions inspection of the Bakersfield plant that led to an air pollution citation.

On Aug. 2, Bowman said he received his first performance evaluation as environmental control manager. “He received relatively low marks,” the judge noted.

In addition to the Bakersfield confrontation with Mobil lawyers, Bowman tangled with the Mobil Chemical’s Office of General Counsel by objecting to their efforts to edit his staff’s reports, which pinpointed regulatory problems in Mobil Chemical plants.

One reason for Bowman’s poor performance evaluation, the judge said, is that Lindberg wrote Bowman’s superior that the environmental control manager “has been more of a hindrance than a help in trying to solve the Bakersfield problem.” Lindberg added in the critical letter that Bowman’s failure to respect the Office of General Counsel was “a fatal flaw.”

Mobil is resisting efforts to unseal environmental assessment reports on 17 plants that were performed while Bowman was in charge of the environmental control department.

In another confrontation with Mobil lawyers, Bowman cited a Mobil legal memo opposing his practice of sending the environmental assessment reports to top executives. Bowman said he wanted the executives to read the reports so they could correct any deficiencies.

But Colbert, the company’s chief environmental attorney, objected. In the case of a report on a plant in Illinois, he wrote that widely distributing the report would expose all managers who received it to potential liability because it contained “several admissions of non-compliance” with environmental regulations. In the future, Colbert said, distribution of such reports would be restricted to limit liability of top management.

Although Mobil documents in the court file detail numerous complaints about Bowman from his superiors and subordinates for being overbearing, the company’s position is that he lost his job because of cost cutting.

The judge noted that in 1986, the year that Bowman lost his job, Mobil Chemical had its best year ever, with net earnings rising to a record $140 million, an increase of 164% from 1985 earnings.