Mobil Plant

In a letter (Feb. 26), Harry Raech echoes Mobil Oil’s unctuous concern about the dangers of switching from deadly hydrofluoric acid to concentrated sulfuric acid.

For 25 years, I worked at a plant which handled more than 100,000 gallons of concentrated sulfuric acid daily. We stored it, pumped it, filtered it, heated and cooled it in combination with highly flammable solvents. And inevitably, even in a well-managed safety conscious plant, we sprayed it, leaked it and spilled it. We killed no one and, yes, we occasionally injured an individual worker. But we had no major disaster because the potential for one from a spill of sulfuric acid simply does not exist.

Four-thousand-gallon loads of hydrofluoric acid are trucked into Mobil’s Torrance plant 25 times a year. A traffic accident involving any one of these loads could cause a Bhopal disaster. So could a major release from the 29,000 gallons in use at Mobil’s refinery. A comparable spill of sulfuric acid couldn’t. In any case, Raech’s concern is specious. Mobil can manufacture sulfuric acid on site or have it piped in from existing plants. Mobil is concerned with money only.

Even if you believe Mobil’s projected cost of $100 million for the changeover, with the billions of gallons of product produced at its plant annually, that probably calculates out to less than a cent a gallon. My life’s worth more. I’m voting yes on Measure A (which would force Mobil to restructure its refinery operations) on March 6.

BERNIE HOLLANDER

Torrance