Pipeline Spills Aren’t Only Problems to Plague Mobil
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 company’s 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 company’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 so they would be shielded 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 their 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, who objected to the move as unethical, claimed that 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 to resist 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 there was no love lost between him and his former employer. Following his retirement in 1987, Olson filed his own age discrimination suit against Mobil, which was dismissed.
