Her Crusade Has Turned Up Heat on Acid Use Issue

Linda Green recently had a disturbing dream.

In it, the Manhattan Beach homemaker says, she was struggling to outrun a low-floating chemical cloud to reach her 9-year-old daughter, Chelsea, who was standing on a distant playing field.

“When I finally got there she was lying motionless on the ground,” Green said. “It was awful. I woke up screaming.”

Green, 38, calls the nightmare a key motivator in her campaign to stir local support for a swift phase-out of hydrofluoric acid, a highly toxic chemical used in the South Bay by two refineries and a chemical plant.

Her goal is to force the South Coast Air Quality Management District to toughen a proposal that would phase out bulk use of the acid by 1999 unless a safe form of the chemical is developed.

The agency’s staff recommended last year that hydrofluoric acid be banned by 1995, but it is now proposing a more gradual phase-out to give industry time to try to develop a safe form of the chemical.

With the new plan scheduled to go before the AQMD governing board on April 5, Green has shifted into organizational overdrive. Relying on form letters, petitions and frequent appearances before local school and city leaders, she is scrambling to muster community support for an earlier deadline, Jan. 1, 1994.

Partly due to Green’s efforts, the Manhattan Beach City Council and school board have issued calls for an early phase-out of hydrofluoric acid. And this week more than 100 residents turned out for a town meeting on the issue organized by a citizens group that Green has formed.

“She seems to be everywhere at once,” Manhattan Beach City Councilwoman Pat Collins said. “She’s been before the City Council, the school board, the PTAs. She’s pursuing this very aggressively.”

Until January, Green spent most of her time raising her daughter, teaching art as a volunteer at Grand View Elementary School, and serving on the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation, a private group that raises money for the city’s K-8 school district.

Then, she says, she read news articles on the dangers of hydrofluoric acid, which is used by the Mobil oil refinery in Torrance, the Ultramar refinery in Wilmington and the Allied Signal refrigerant plant in El Segundo.

The refineries use hydrofluoric acid to produce high-grade unleaded gasoline. The plants could convert to a process that involves sulfuric acid, but industry representatives say the switch would cost millions. There is no known substitute for the chemical in the production of refrigerants.

Hydrofluoric acid can form a deadly ground-hugging cloud if it is released, and industry tests have shown that a two-minute release of 500 gallons per minute could prove lethal up to five miles downwind.

AQMD regulators and companies that use the chemical say the latest hydrofluoric acid proposal does not pose an undue risk because it would require interim plant safety improvements that will minimize the risk of a spill.

The assurances do not persuade Green.

Although there has never been a major release of hydrofluoric acid in the South Bay, Green says information about the chemical persuaded her that her family’s safety is jeopardized by the large quantities being handled at the nearby Allied Signal plant.

She owes it to her daughter, she says, to fight for the earliest deadline possible: “My view is that I give her vitamins, and I make her eat the broccoli she doesn’t like. So why shouldn’t I address this?”

In January, Green launched her campaign, aggressively applying the lessons she learned as a sales representative before leaving the 9-to-5 work world nine years ago.

“I have developed a certain amount of confidence in dealing with people I don’t know,” she says. “You learn how to cold-call and how to be persistent.”

Green says her husband Dennis fully supports her effort but sometimes balks at the hours she puts in: “On Sunday, he’ll stick his head in the office I have at home and say, ‘Is this going to take all day?’ And then he’ll come back again and say, ‘Is this going to take all day?’ ”

Says Dennis: “Linda is a really intense woman. She doesn’t do anything part time. She’s sunk her teeth into this and hopes to get a settlement that’s beneficial for the community.”

At the same time, Green has become increasingly familiar to local government officials.

Although city leaders had long intended to pass a resolution on the hydrofluoric acid issue, Councilwoman Collins says, Green’s persistence was key in getting the City Council to consider the matter. In February, the council passed a resolution favoring a phase-out of hydrofluoric acid, and this month it approved a letter supporting a deadline of 1993.

Jerry Davis, superintendent of the city’s school district, says Green played a pivotal role in the school board’s call March 13 for “an accelerated phase-out schedule” of bulk hydrofluoric acid use.

“I have to give her credit,” Davis said. “She brought it forward. She came to the school board meeting and the district advisory meeting and asked for support, which we gave her. She’s an example of when somebody cares enough about her community, they can make a difference.”

Green has also formed a community group called Citizens for a Safe South Bay to exert community pressure on the AQMD board. Composed of only nine organizers, the group is circulating petitions and form letters and enlisting residents for a bus trip to the AQMD’s board meeting April 5.

The group held a town meeting on Monday that consisted of a question-and-answer session featuring AQMD officials, environmentalists and Allied Signal executives.

“I was enthused we got such a good turnout on Academy Awards night,” said Bill Frash, a Citizens for a Safe South Bay organizer. “We weren’t sure whether we’d get 12 people or 120, and we ended up with about 120.”

Green has also become familiar to those who favor the 1999 phase-out deadline she opposes. AQMD officials acknowledge her success in triggering debate about whether the agency’s plan is in the best interest of South Bay residents.

“She has been effective in getting people organized,” said AQMD spokesman Bill Kelly. “We have someone here who is willing to spend the time and energy on the issue, and it’s going to improve the debate at the (AQMD) hearing.”

Bill Mason, an executive with Allied Signal, says his company disagrees strongly with Green: “The community is well protected, and we feel we can continue operating safely.”

But in tacit acknowledgment that her lobbying is having an effect, he says he hopes his company can bring her around to its point of view. Said Mason: “We’d certainly like to continue trying.”