Perils of Mobil Now Well-Documented

Thanks to the diligence of the Los Angeles Times, the citizens of Torrance now know the depths of the danger posed by the Mobil refinery.

We now know about the earthquake hazards, the use of unqualified outside contractors, the boasts of being “able to pull the wool over the eyes” of AQMD inspectors, the conclusion drawn by Technica, a consulting firm hired by Mobil, that the Torrance refinery was “almost three times as likely as the average unit to have a major catastrophe,” and about the fact that Mobil’s own documents revealed that the Torrance refinery “had Mobil’s worst overall safety record for several years.”

But all of this is commentary, because we know that the engineers most familiar with the refinery literally feared for their lives and the lives of everyone within three miles of the refinery on Nov. 24, 1987. We now know that Torrance firefighters were prepared to testify under oath that when they responded on that date to an explosion at the refinery, a Mobil supervisor implored them to cool down the hydrofluoric acid alkylation unit, because the unit was within three minutes of exploding and killing everyone within three miles. We now know that these supervisors as well as the operators of other units were “running as fast as they could away from the scene of the explosion.” The engineers most familiar with the refinery made a risk assessment with their feet.

However, there is one vital question the answer to which we still do not know: Why did the Torrance City Council, privy to all of the just released information concerning the near-miss of a major catastrophe involving the loss of thousands of lives, authorize the settlement of Torrance’s public nuisance lawsuit on terms that allow for the continued use of hydrofluoric acid at the Mobil refinery through the end of 1997?

CRAIG KESSLER

Torrance