Safety Plans for Refinery Accidents Stir Confusion : Explosion: Texaco blast reawakens fears of residents living near South Bay refineries. In Wilmington area, evacuation of neighborhoods was spotty and inconsistent with emergency policy.

After 26 years living in the shadow of Mobil Oil’s Torrance refinery, Rosann Markert had an immediate, spine-chilling reaction to last Thursday night’s explosion.

“My God, it’s Mobil,” she said out loud.

She was wrong, of course--the blast had occurred at Texaco’s Wilmington refinery. But her reaction illustrates a common problem in much of the South Bay: Residents feel nervous living cheek by jowl with giant industrial neighbors.

Though six oil refineries sit close to houses in the South Bay, evacuation and safety plans remain as much a mystery to many residents as the intricate chemical reactions that take place in the plants.

In some cities, crews are to use bullhorns and go door to door if fire officials decide an evacuation is necessary. Other cities have installed computerized telephone systems that can dial emergency messages to entire neighborhoods at a moment’s notice.

No matter what the preparations, however, emergencies breed confusion.

“They say it’s safe, but I don’t see how,” said Alonzo McKinley, 36, who lives half a mile east of the Texaco refinery.

In an emergency, even officials get confused. While the city of Los Angeles’ plans call for fire officials to order an evacuation, Thursday night’s “precautionary” evacuation in Wilmington was started by police roughly 30 minutes after the blast, Fire Department spokesman Paul Gutierrez said.

Computer records show that it was not until 1:14 a.m. that Los Angeles Fire Department Cmdr. Davis R. Parsons requested the evacuation of a small residential area southwest of the fire, Gutierrez said.

By that time, police in squad cars had long since completed a sweep of the area, announcing over loudspeakers that residents should leave their homes.

Ultimately, 600 confused and tired residents were evacuated from a neighborhood bounded by Lomita and Alameda boulevards, Sanford Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway. They were allowed to return home at 3:30 a.m.

However, smoke and fumes from the fire never wafted over the evacuated Wilmington homes. Instead, the cloud floated northeast, over portions of Long Beach that remained occupied. A large tract of Navy homes in Long Beach overlooking the refinery was cleared for a short time after the blast, but residents said they were never directed to any evacuation center.

“They just told me once I was out that I couldn’t go back,” said resident Bob Bedell. “They didn’t say where I could go.”

For some oil company critics, the Texaco accident and its aftermath underscore long-running concerns about the potential dangers of refinery operations.

“People tend to think that pipelines and refineries are neutral places,” said Michele Grumet, who works with a coalition that has opposed projects to build pipelines to transport crude oil to local refineries. “People need to remember that these refineries are laden with toxics.”

Torrance attorney Robert Mars, who has filed a class-action suit against Mobil on behalf of 600 Torrance homeowners over safety and pollution concerns, said he is surprised that accidents do not happen more often. He said he received calls from about 20 Wilmington residents Friday asking questions about refinery safety.

“Refineries and residential neighborhoods don’t mix,” Mars said. Based on materials he has seen, he said, there should be “a three-mile radius around refineries where there are no residents.”

If a major refinery accident occurs, there would be no time to evacuate residents before significant injuries occurred, he contends. Fires and explosions travel too quickly, and “there’s people living right up to the fence of these refineries.”

Torrance has done a good job preparing for an emergency, he said, but still may not be able to avert disaster.

“No matter how hard they try, I don’t think they can prevent a major disaster if it’s going to happen,” he said.

A 1987 explosion at Mobil and a string of refinery accidents that followed prompted the city of Torrance to sue Mobil as a public nuisance. Under the terms of a 1990 legal agreement, Mobil must submit to inspections by a court-supervised safety adviser and must stop using one of its dangerous chemicals, hydrofluoric acid, within the next five years.

Still, Torrance residents remain jittery about the plant.

“Every time the house rattles or I hear a noise, I don’t normally think earthquake. I think Mobil,” said one north Torrance resident who would not give her name because she is part of Mars’ class-action lawsuit.

“Last night was scary,” she said. “It felt like someone picked up the house and dropped it.”

Some of her neighbors, however, are not concerned.

Marshel Powell, 71, who has lived on Felbar Street since 1953, said he has “no problem” with living next door to a refinery.

“It’s people who don’t understand or have an ax to grind that complain,” he said. “You know there’ll be things happening, like leaks and accidents, but so what?”

Powell, who was a water treatment and steam generator operator at the Chevron refinery in El Segundo for 10 years until 1983, said with the amount of volatile substances refineries handle, he is surprised they do not have accidents every day.

“You shouldn’t move next door to a refinery, then complain,” he said. “You knew that before you got there.”

The small city of El Segundo has existed for decades in the shadow of potentially hazardous sites ranging from a Chevron Oil refinery on the south side of town to the Los Angeles International Airport on the north and the Hyperion sewage treatment plant on the west.

Consequently, this city of 15,000 is very safety-minded.

Consider El Segundo school Superintendent William Manahan. Along with first aid supplies, Manahan has stored large quantities of food and water at all three schools in town. Two-way radios on all campuses would allow communication between schools if telephones are knocked out.

Although nothing has happened to trigger El Segundo’s emergency plans, the sense of danger is keen. “It’s not an alarmist attitude,” Manahan said, “but it’s a reality.”

El Segundo joined forces with Hawthorne, Gardena and Manhattan Beach to set up a computerized telephone evacuation network. If all or part of the city had to be evacuated in case of fire or hazardous chemical spill, residents would receive a computerized telephone call telling them to leave their homes.

The network, said Mayor Carol Jacobson, has “all the listed phone numbers and we (sent out notices requesting) any unlisted numbers.” The city’s Fire Department commanders, the mayor said, are authorized to dial the computer and use a security code to set an evacuation in motion.

Torrance approved installation of a similar system five months ago, paid for by Mobil.

The notification system, as well as a 24-hour information hot line about day-to-day refinery operations, are part of Mobil’s effort to prove that people can live safely next door to an oil giant, company spokesman Barry Engelberg said.

“I think we are proving that here in Torrance,” he said. “The Mobil refinery is the safest refinery on the West Coast.”

Mobil’s public relations campaign came only after accidents alerted residents to the dangers their biggest next-door neighbor could pose.

Now that Texaco has set off a loud warning, its neighbors hope to see similar results.

JoAnn Wysocki, president of the Wilmington Homeowners Assn., said her group will have representatives from Texaco at a meeting 7 p.m. Thursday at the Banning Park recreation center.

“It has been a concern for us that the community really doesn’t know anything about the emergency evacuation plans,” she said. “No matter where you go in Wilmington,” Wysocki said, “you have a catastrophe on one side of you or the other.”

This story was reported by staff writers Lorna Fernandes, Michele Fuetsch, Janet Rae-Dupree and Deborah Schoch. It was written by Rae-Dupree.