Trial Opens Over Fatal ’88 Mobil Refinery Blast

A fatal explosion at Mobil Oil’s Torrance refinery two years ago was a “tragic, unpredictable, unavoidable accident,” not a crime, said an attorney for a contract company whose officials went on trial in Municipal Court Thursday.

In opening arguments for a rare criminal trial on industrial safety violations, attorney Warren L. Ettinger argued that no one should be blamed for the July 15, 1988, explosion of a tank at the refinery because no one knows exactly why the tank blew up.

Prosecutors, however, say they know exactly what caused the explosion: Supervisors and executives of Cal Cat Chemical Co., a Benecia-based contract company, did not tell their workers about the dangers of the chemicals they were using and allowed them to create an explosive mix inside the tank.

Cal Cat employee Winston Jones, 30, was standing on top of the tank when the blast hit. He died instantly.

One of his co-workers, David Moustafi, suffered burns over three-quarters of his body. Another co-worker, Jerry Lekberg, lost hearing completely in one ear and still experiences frequent flashbacks.

A year after the blast, the city of Torrance filed misdemeanor charges against Cal Cat Chemical; the company’s president, Paul Taylor; its research director, Frank Straw, and on-site supervisor James Hernandez. A Municipal Court judge in October dismissed charges that also had been filed against Mobil and two of its executives. Prosecutors are appealing that decision.

The trial, expected to take three to four weeks, will feature dozens of technical witnesses on the chemical aspects of what the workers were doing, their training, their injuries, as well as testimony from the two survivors. Mobil officials may also be called.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Anthony G. Patchett told jurors that the explosion took place as Jones, Moustafi and Lekberg tried to treat sludge removed from the bottom of a sour water storage tank.

Sour water, a waste product of refining gasoline, is contaminated with sulfur compounds, most typically toxic hydrogen sulfide. The rotten egg-smelling substance must be neutralized, and oily hydrocarbons, rust particles and other contaminants must be removed from the sludge before it can be taken to a landfill.

Cal Cat Chemical, which had been working under contract at Mobil for about two years, had been hired to conduct that process.

An initial attempt, using chemicals called surfactants and a potassium permanganate solution, failed. The explosion took place, Patchett said, because defendants Taylor and Straw then decided to alter the process by using hydrogen peroxide.

According to prosecutors, the workers were not told to dilute the new chemical before adding it to the process. The concentrated hydrogen peroxide, Patchett said, created an uncontrollable reaction with chemicals in the sludge, causing the explosion.

Cal Cat officials, Patchett said, “failed to give any written safety instructions to their employees, failed to explain the dangers of hydrogen peroxide and failed to monitor temperatures in the tank which could have provided some warning of a problem.”

Defense attorneys, however, said Cal Cat officials hired Moustafi, who had been trained as a chemical engineer, to prevent just such a problem.

Moustafi “had the responsibility of testing the (hydrogen peroxide) to see if it would indeed work. He did so, and it did work,” Ettinger said. “Mr. Moustafi did what he believed was right.”

The company, Ettinger argued, should not be responsible for training the engineer it had hired as an expert.

Prosecutors said Moustafi did not have enough training and experience to make that judgment and should not have been given that responsibility.

The trial is being held at the Best Western Sunrise Hotel in Redondo Beach because the cramped Torrance courthouse does not have enough courtrooms to handle lengthy trials, said South Bay Municipal Court Judge Josh M. Fredricks.