Mobil, Torrance Alter Refinery-Safety Agreement : Safety: The firm appointed by a judge to monitor conditions at the work site has been replaced. Costs had exceeded the program’s budget ceiling.
The company named by a judge to monitor safety at the Mobil Oil Corp. refinery in Torrance was replaced by another firm this fall amid budget problems.
Westinghouse Electric Corp., which served for three years as the refinery’s first safety adviser, was replaced Sept. 30 in the most significant revision to date of a 1990 pact between Mobil and the city of Torrance. The change was discussed by the Torrance City Council behind closed doors and was not publicly announced because it was considered a matter of litigation.
That much-heralded pact between the city and Mobil grew out of a public nuisance lawsuit that Torrance brought against the company after a series of fires and other accidents at the sprawling 750-acre refinery. Just weeks before trial, Mobil agreed to the appointment of a court-supervised safety adviser, an independent consulting firm that was supposed to monitor the refinery for seven years and recommend changes to improve safety.
But a Westinghouse spokesman says the firm received instructions in April--from the court via Mobil--to “minimize rather dramatically” its work on the project. Legal documents indicate that program costs have soared well above the $1-million ceiling originally set for the safety adviser through 1997.
Now, the city and Mobil have agreed to replace Westinghouse with EQE Engineering International of Irvine, which is working on the project under a revamped budget.
Although Mobil has paid the safety adviser’s bills, the city has spent $1.6 million on outside legal help and experts’ fees for its lawsuit against Mobil and the ongoing costs of seeing that the agreement is carried out.
Despite the cost to the city and Westinghouse’s departure, Torrance officials say they have full confidence in the monitoring project and believe it already has created a safer refinery.
“I really think it is a landmark activity,” said Torrance City Atty. John Fellows. “I think we’ll all stand back and be very proud of it.”
City and Mobil officials say there is no evidence that an Oct 19 explosion and fire at the Mobil refinery has any relationship to changes in the safety adviser program. The cause of the accident, which injured 28 workers, remains under investigation.
EQE is conducting its own investigation, and its project manager, Steven T. Maher, said last month that he went to the refinery after the explosion and witnessed the emergency response firsthand.
Even before recent budget problems, the project was not proceeding in the way the city thought it would when it signed a consent decree with Mobil four years ago.
During the 1991 search for a safety adviser, for instance, Torrance officials had lobbied against Westinghouse in favor of another firm, SRI International, which had estimated the project’s first stage alone would cost up to $1 million.
But retired Superior Court Judge Harry V. Peetris, who is overseeing the project, instead chose Westinghouse, Mobil’s nominee. He also set a $1 million spending limit for the entire program, over vehement objections from the city.
Despite their early unhappiness, several city officials said they are pleased with the program’s accomplishments, and they specifically praised Maher, who initially served as project manager for the Mobil project when he worked for Westinghouse.
Maher left Westinghouse in March, 1993, for a job at EQE, then a subcontractor on the Mobil project. He remained involved in the project “in a support role and on an as-needed basis” but not in the “mainstream,” Maher said in an interview last month.
The Sept. 30 agreement states that Westinghouse submitted bills for the project exceeding $1.35 million.
Westinghouse spokesman Vaughn Gilbert called the charges legitimate, saying they should have come as no surprise to the city or to Mobil. Westinghouse had informed them early on, he said, that additional work by its staff was needed to meet the parties’ requests for a significant number of reports “to keep this from going back to the court.”
Then, following an April, 1994, meeting between the city, Mobil and Judge Peetris, Westinghouse received instructions from the court, delivered by Mobil, advising it to reduce its activity, Gilbert said.
“We were told to minimize rather dramatically what we were doing there,” he said, adding that no critical tasks were abandoned.
Attorneys for Torrance and Mobil said Monday they could not immediately confirm Westinghouse’s account. Ernest Getto, an attorney representing Mobil, said that much of the project was complete by early this year, “so that the work remaining to be done by the safety adviser was a minority, a fraction.”
In fact, refinery officials say they have made significant strides in improving safety at the refinery.
Bill Buckalew, refinery environmental health and safety manager, disagreed with the notion that the safety adviser effort was cut back. The fact that Mobil spent more than the $1 million cap, Buckalew said, “shows that maybe we did more than the consent decree asked for.”
The project is ahead of schedule and more than 60% complete, he said. “From our point of view, we didn’t slow down anything.”
Copies of Westinghouse’s quarterly project reports were not immediately available. Peetris referred an Oct. 26 request for those reports to Mobil’s attorney, saying the reports would be available after they were reviewed for confidential and proprietary information.
Meanwhile, EQE’s Maher said Monday that he recently was informed that he is not authorized to talk to the media and that “the appropriate interface for the media is through the court.”
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Since last month, the Torrance Courthouse clerk’s office has been unable to locate the court file for Torrance’s lawsuit, including records of recent activity between the city and Mobil. The Times instead obtained copies of the Sept. 30 agreement from attorneys for the city and Mobil.
That agreement shows that the city and Mobil have agreed to a new formula for paying the safety adviser for the remainder of the seven-year project.
The new plan limits the amount of money Mobil must pay while opening the door for the city to pick up some of the bill.
After settling accounts with Westinghouse, Mobil will provide another $360,000 to cover EQE’s anticipated budget. If costs exceed that amount, “all such further fees and expenses, if approved by the court, shall be borne by the city,” states the agreement, which does not impose a new ceiling.
“We wanted to make sure that the consent decree was funded sufficiently for it to be finished in a craftsman-like manner,” said Michael Leslie, an attorney representing the city.
Torrance Mayor Dee Hardison called the $360,000 budget realistic. “To the best of everyone’s projections, it’s sufficient,” she said.
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Currently, EQE is working on what some consider the most crucial chapter of the Torrance-Mobil pact--the assessment of highly toxic hydrofluoric acid, which is used at the refinery to boost the octane in unleaded gasoline.
Under the pact, Mobil agreed to stop using hydrofluoric acid by the end of 1997 unless it can develop a safer form of the acid by the end of this year. EQE is responsible for approving any modified hydrofluoric acid process proposed by Mobil.
Refinery safety has also become an issue in the review of a major Mobil construction project to allow production of cleaner-burning fuels. Last month’s explosion occurred near work on the clean fuels project, a Mobil spokesman said.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Diane Wayne will hold a hearing Friday on whether to halt construction at Mobil after her recent finding that the environmental impact report for the project was procedurally flawed.
William Wong, an attorney for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, said that Mobil should be allowed to continue work on the project. But an attorney representing Pipe Fitters Local 250, which brought a lawsuit questioning the environmental review, said the union will point to the Oct. 19 accident as proof that construction should be halted.
“We think that the EIR needs to consider accidents that could jeopardize the health and safety of human beings,” said the attorney, Thomas R. Adams.
