TORRANCE’S SECRET CASE AGAIST MOBIL : Document Alleges Hazards at Refinery : Lawsuit: Confidential draft of legal brief asserts that Mobil officials took a “Band-Aid approach” to repairs and tried to downplay hazards.
Before Torrance and Mobil Oil Corp. reached a legal truce last year, lawyers for the city were prepared to argue in court that a dizzying array of management and safety problems -- many never publicly disclosed--plagued the company’s Torrance refinery.
According to a draft of a confidential legal brief obtained by The Times, Torrance had concluded during pretrial preparations that Mobil managers repeatedly placed profit ahead of safety at the refinery, where there have been at least six fatalities, two major fires, numerous accidents and scores of injuries since 1979.
Because the brief, largely based on Mobil documents turned over to the city, includes the legal arguments Torrance planned to use against the company, no Mobil officials have ever seen it. But the company believes any problems that did exist at the time the document was written last October have been, or soon will be, resolved.
Calling the brief “a lawyer’s opening argument, not a court’s conclusion,” Mobil spokesman Jim Carbonetti said it likely contains “biased and unverified information and statements.”
In a statement released Wednesday, Carbonetti also said: “Whatever validity there may have been to the contents in the brief is history. Whatever it says about the refinery and its employees attempts to describe the past, not the present.”
Some city officials, including the mayor and fire chief, said they believe Mobil is more sensitive to safety concerns now than it was last year.
“There were a number of very frightening discoveries made in preparation for the suit. Our suit was our reaction to them,” Mayor Katy Geissert said. “I believe that there have been modifications made that address some of the issues of concern to the city. . . . Certainly we’re not hearing the explosions or seeing the big puffs of smoke as frequently.”
The 70-page draft of the brief asserts that Mobil officials took a “Band-Aid approach” to repairs, thwarted safety surveys, tried to downplay the dangers posed by the refinery’s use of hydrofluoric acid and used unqualified contractors for dangerous jobs.
In addition, the document said the refinery could be hit by earthquakes from any of several nearby faults, toppling tanks filled with hazardous chemicals and setting up a catastrophic chain-reaction explosion.
The brief was submitted as part of an effort to resolve without a trial Torrance’s public nuisance lawsuit against Mobil. The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in April, 1989.
Although the document obtained by The Times is a draft, city officials indicated it likely had no major changes before it was submitted to the court on Oct. 2, 1990. The trial was set for Nov. 5.
Attorneys gave the brief, which summarized the city’s trial strategy and exhibits, to retired Superior Court Judge Harry V. Peetris, who was assigned the case.
Within days of the brief’s presentation to the judge, the city agreed not to go to trial. In return, Mobil said it would phase out or modify use of hydrofluoric acid by the end of 1997 and allow a court-supervised safety adviser to monitor refinery operations.
Without a trial, however, public disclosures of the extent of problems at the refinery were precluded.
Peetris has been considering since February a request by The Times and Copley Press to review more than 70,000 pages of material Mobil gave the city during 18 months of trial preparation. Torrance this week refused to release the final brief, citing a confidentiality agreement it signed with Mobil in August, 1989.
As a result, the draft provides the first intensive look at what the city believed in October, 1990, were its most compelling reasons for seeking court-ordered regulation of the sprawling, 750-acre refinery.
PROFIT AHEAD OF SAFETY
According to the draft, Mobil’s own documents said that the Torrance refinery, one of the company’s oldest facilities, had Mobil’s worst overall safety record for several years.
“Mobil’s own documents admit . . . that management makes only ‘Band-Aid repairs’ instead of spending money to implement strong preventive maintenance programs and to replace potentially hazardous equipment,” the brief said.
The brief cited a July, 1987, letter written by then-refinery manager Wyman Robb in which he calls the Torrance facility “a bit of a bootstrap operation.”
The brief said: “One of the most disturbing discoveries made during plaintiff’s review of Mobil’s documents is the number of major repair and replacement projects at the refinery which have been delayed, ignored, or reduced in scope or funding years after the problem first was noted by refinery employees.”
“One employee characterized Mobil’s attitude toward preventive maintenance as ‘run it until it breaks.’ ”
Attorneys for the city urged in the brief that Peetris place Mobil under strict court supervision.
“The city can ill afford to have Mobil executives deciding, on the basis of their own cost-benefit analysis, how long a dangerous condition will be permitted to exist before it becomes cost justified, in Mobil’s eyes, to repair it,” the brief said. “If Mobil’s luck runs out before the repair is made, the city and its residents will pay the price for Mobil’s decision.”
HYDROFLUORIC ACID HAZARDS
Among the more alarming revelations in the brief is a study done by a consultant--Technica Inc.--hired by Mobil to help with preparation of a risk-management prevention plan for the city in 1988.
Technica studied safety at the refinery’s alkylation unit, where hydrofluoric acid is used as a catalyst to boost the octane of unleaded gasoline. The acid, which can form a lethal, ground-hugging cloud when spilled, seriously injures and kills at very low concentrations.
Technica researchers concluded that Mobil’s unit was “almost three times as likely as the average unit to have a major catastrophe,” the brief said.
“Some of the key problem areas noted were: nonexistent, incomplete or conflicting written procedures; severe under manning of the unit requiring qualified operators to work a 67-hour week, including 18-hour shifts; poor control room design, including inadequate labeling, ineffective alarms and out-of-date process schematics; operators receiving no training to handle emergencies or abnormal operating conditions; and indications in the log book that leaks of one sort or another are a recurrent problem,” the brief said.
Mobil managers decided not to use Technica’s results in the final prevention plan delivered to the city’s Fire Department.
“Due to the poor showing, Technica will not show the results as part of the risk assessment. This could be devastating,” noted a second Mobil consultant quoted in the brief.
The brief criticized safety measures put in place by Mobil to lessen danger in the event of an accidental hydrofluoric acid spill.
Water spray monitors, installed to check the spread of hydrogen fluoride fumes created by an acid release, are “designed to still allow 20% of the hydrofluoric acid to form a poisonous cloud,” the brief said.
Also of concern was an acid evacuation system installed by Mobil in 1990 to remove the refinery’s 29,000 gallons of hydrofluoric acid to an underground tank in the event of an explosion. Because the tank is only 100 feet from Crenshaw Boulevard, “if it or its pipes rupture, a catastrophic release is almost guaranteed,” the brief said.
City officials rejected the initial risk-management prevention plan and worked until April of this year with Mobil to create a new one, Torrance Fire Chief Scott Adams said Tuesday.
The new plan calls for a number of improvements to the alkylation process, he said.
“They have spent, and will be spending, a considerable amount of money on that (alkylation) unit,” Adams said. “I’m pleased by what is happening.”
EARTHQUAKE HAZARDS
One of the paramount concerns cited in the brief is the earthquake hazard to the refinery. The city’s attorneys promised “extensive expert testimony” during trial on the refinery’s earthquake hazards.
Noting that at least six different faults are close enough to the refinery to generate a significant quake, the brief said “the potential catastrophe at the Torrance refinery arising from a significant earthquake on any of the faults in the Los Angeles Basin is extreme.”
Dames & Moore, a consultant hired by Mobil to prepare the seismic portion of the risk-management prevention plan in 1988, “was tightly monitored by Mobil and its reports were highly edited by both Mobil management and its attorneys,” the brief said.
Nevertheless, the consultant’s reports revealed a number of possible earthquake hazards at the refinery, according to the brief.
“Mobil’s own documents will prove that, due to the age of the Torrance refinery, its process units are highly congested and do not even meet Mobil’s minimum fire and safety standards for separation between the units,” the brief said.
Even Mobil’s insurers warned the company of “a domino-type catastrophe should even one unit become involved in a major fire,” the brief said.
Two minor earthquakes in recent years have caused some damage to the refinery. On Oct. 11, 1987, a quake registering about 3.2 on the Richter Scale caused liquefaction of the soil beneath a concrete-lined canal in one unit, cracking it.
Then, on Nov. 19, 1988, a 4.5 quake broke a pipeline in the refinery’s nitrogen plant, releasing a large cloud of the chemical. Although harmless, the release of the inert gas “drives home the threat posed if a major earthquake should sever a pipeline containing highly toxic hydrofluoric acid or highly explosive gases such as propane or butane,” the brief said.
Additionally, a strong quake could knock out much of Mobil’s water supply for fighting fire and could cut off the electricity needed to control the process units, the brief said..
While city officials interviewed this week repeated their concern about earthquake hazards at the refinery, they said Mobil has been working to correct problems. In addition, the court-supervised safety adviser has hired another consultant to conduct a thorough seismic audit of the refinery. Work will begin with a two-day survey of the plant on Sept. 30.
OUTSIDE CONTRACTORS
Other safety hazards were due in part to the large number of outside contractors--many of them unqualified--working at the refinery, the brief said.
“Mobil’s own internal documents brag that Mobil pays the lowest rate for its contractors of any refiners on the West Coast,” the brief said. “Moreover, Mobil’s documents and incident reports show that an extremely high percentage of accidents at the refinery, more than 40% in some years, are due to untrained contractors working at the refinery.”
The brief cited an explosion that killed one contract worker and seriously injured two others when chemicals in a tank they were trying to clean were mixed improperly.
The contract company, Benecia-based Cal Cat Chemical Co., and its president pleaded no contest last year to misdemeanor labor code violations in connection with the July 15, 1988, blast. Mobil and two of its former executives were acquitted of criminal charges.
In May, 1989, Mobil again hired the same contractor--which had changed its name to Erikson Environmental--to do the same job “simply because they charged lower rates than other potential contractors for this job,” the brief said.
Fire Department inspectors, alerted to the fact that Mobil again had hired the same contractor, went to the refinery and discovered that Erikson did not have the proper business license or permits to do tank cleaning.
Mobil eventually hired a different contractor for the job. That company and Mobil argued repeatedly against a fire inspector’s instruction that workers be kept away from the tank when the chemicals were mixed, the brief said.
Ultimately, the inspector’s demand was met. Because of that no one was hurt when there was another powerful explosion and flash fire during the process, the brief said.
DISREGARD FOR REGULATIONS
The brief said that internal Mobil documents about refinery inspections included reports from workers who bragged about being “able to pull the wool over the eyes” of an inspector for the South Coast Air Quality Management District. In one case, the brief said, the Mobil documents told of an employee standing in front of leaking equipment so an inspector would not notice it.
When Torrance sent in two consultants to conduct a safety and environmental audit of the refinery in 1988, officials at Mobil’s Fairfax, Va., headquarters made a “conscious decision not to provide the consultants full access to necessary refinery documents,” the brief said, citing an April, 1989, letter written by a Fairfax official.
The brief also claimed the company repeatedly refused to take responsibility for emissions and problems. It cited as an example a March, 1989, release of hydrogen sulfide which sent eight students and two teachers at nearby Magruder Middle School to area hospitals.
“Even though Mobil has internally acknowledged its responsibility for (the release), Mobil never disclosed this fact to the South Coast Air Quality Management District,” the brief said. Because the cloud had dissipated before regulators could arrive, the AQMD never issued a citation for the incident.
Even when violations were issued, the brief noted, Mobil paid them “as a cost of doing business.”
“Mobil often is not cited for its misdeeds and, in the instances where it is, it can bargain and negotiate the fines to a level which fails to make even a dent in its corporate profits,” the brief said.
In concluding the brief, the city’s attorneys noted that Mobil’s researchers began looking for alternatives to hydrofluoric acid shortly after a series of 1986 industry tests demonstrated the lethal potential of the chemical in a heavily populated area. Mobil already planned to stop using the chemical by the year 2000. But “ten years is simply too long to wait,” the brief said.
“Only the appointment of a monitor with the wide-ranging powers set forth in the city’s proposed consent decree will force the refinery to ‘clean up its act,’ ” the brief concluded. “The city must obtain the relief it requests before it is too late.”
