Oil Giant’s Activities Have Faced Challenges on Other Grounds : Courts: Mobil was forced to hire a safety adviser. An environmental ‘cover-up’ brought a $1.3-million award. But some say the company is doing its best.

Mobil Oil Corp. has taken considerable heat for spills from its crude oil pipeline. But the line is not the only part of Mobil’s far-flung operations to come under scrutiny.

In recent years, explosions and fires at the 62-year-old Torrance refinery killed several Mobil or contractor workers and injured many others. In 1989, amid a series of such accidents, the city of Torrance filed a lawsuit against Mobil, accusing it of operating the refinery in a “callous and indifferent” manner.

Mobil, saying it is committed to safe operations, settled the case last October, agreeing to take the unprecedented step of retaining an independent safety adviser to monitor conditions at the refinery.

A month later, Mobil was ordered to pay $1.375 million in damages to a former company official who said he had been fired for opposing a cover-up of environmental problems at a Mobil plant in Bakersfield.

The former official, Valcar Bowman, had been environmental affairs manager for the oil giant’s Mobil Chemical Co. subsidiary. In his lawsuit, filed in federal court in New Jersey, Bowman said he got into trouble for resisting efforts by company lawyers to sanitize environmental reports. He said the lawyers also tried to keep environmental reports away from top executives in an effort to shield them from liability.

Bowman’s firing came a few months after a raid on the Torrance refinery by investigators for the Los Angeles County district attorney. The investigators, seeking evidence of air pollution violations, seized numerous documents in the July, 1985, raid. No charges were ever filed, but Mobil lawyers feared that the company’s Bakersfield plant would be raided next.

So Mobil moved plant records to the office of its outside legal counsel, in order to cite attorney-client privilege to block release of the documents. Bowman said he objected to the move as unethical, and that his opposition got him fired.

Mobil, which has appealed the verdict, said Bowman was fired merely as a cost-cutting move-although the judge in the case said Mobil Chemical enjoyed record profits the year he was dismissed.

One of Bowman’s witnesses was Philip Olson, a 20-year Mobil veteran who was environmental manager of the Torrance refinery for a time in the late 1970s.

Mobil at one time took a “pretty responsible” approach to environmental rules, Olson said in a telephone interview. But in the 1980s, the company began resisting pollution control investments “unless they were absolutely forced to make them,” he said.

The change in attitude was due partly to the election of Ronald Reagan, who “bought the company line that . . . businesses were overregulated.” After Reagan took office, Mobil postponed planned investments “until it could be sorted out what was going to be required and what wasn’t,” Olson said.

Olson acknowledged that there was no love lost between him and his former employer. After his retirement in 1987, Olson filed his own suit against Mobil, alleging age discrimination, which was dismissed on a technicality. And Olson said he knows nothing about Mobil’s efforts to maintain the crude oil pipeline.

Some say the company has been doing its best.

Bob Gorham, an engineer with the State Fire Marshal’s Office, calls Mobil “a very responsible company.” Oil spills cost the firm “quite a bit of money, so they’re as anxious as anybody” to avoid them, Gorham said.

And in a letter earlier this year to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, Jim Wait, Gorham’s boss and chief of the state fire marshal’s division of pipeline safety, described Mobil as “conscientious and responsive to this office.” The district attorney is considering legal action over Mobil’s nearly 75,000-gallon oil spill in Valencia last January, and had sought information from the fire marshal’s office.

Despite Mobil’s problems with the pipeline, “I have not reached a conclusion that they are a bad operator,” Wait said in an interview. “As a company, they’re probably above average, frankly.”