Council: Torrance Concern Over Refinery

During the past 20 years, Torrance city councils have generally demonstrated high levels of vision, focus and integrity, but tough decisions regarding the Mobil refinery have always brought out the worst in them.

From the late 1980s, when Councilman George Nakano first brought the dangers of hydrofluoric acid to the city’s attention, until last week’s decision to accept an unproven modified hydrofluoric acid technology, the Torrance City Council has displayed an uncanny ability to shoot itself in the foot.

In 1990, six of the seven members of the City Council became so concerned that Councilman Dan Walker might benefit politically from his sponsorship of an initiative banning the use of hydrofluoric acid at the refinery that they actually campaigned against the initiative. Their opposition, not Mobil’s money, buried the initiative, and, in the process, the six council members knocked the legs out from under the city’s pending public nuisance lawsuit.

One of the elements necessary to sustain a claim of public nuisance is a community’s belief that a certain activity poses a threat to life and limb. After the Walker Initiative’s 3-1 drubbing, Mobil was able to proclaim that the Torrance electorate’s rejection of immediate relief belied the City Council’s public nuisance claims. Shortly thereafter, Torrance was forced to settle the nuisance lawsuit on terms that have proven illusory.

By worrying more about the political ambitions of Dan Walker than the consequences of the Walker Initiative’s defeat, the 1990 City Council undermined its own efforts to rid this community of hydrofluoric acid.

In February, 1995, the City Council majority again demonstrated its ability to frame the Mobil debate in a counterproductive way. The four council members who voted to certify the efficacy of Mobil’s modified hydrofluoric acid process based their vote on the confidence they place in Fire Chief Scott Adams.

However, Chief Adams was not the issue. No one doubted the competence, talent and integrity of Scott Adams and his department. The three council members who voted against certifying modified hydrofluoric acid based their decision upon the failed integrity of the scientific process. The experiments that support Mobil’s claims of modified hydrofluoric acid’s efficacy were conducted under the auspices of Mobil, on Mobil equipment and by Mobil employees. The court-appointed safety adviser merely observed Mobil’s experiments and never conducted its own independent investigation. Mobil never published the results of their experiments so that the results could be duplicated by other scientists and researchers. In short, the data that purport to sustain Mobil’s claims remain unverified, uncorroborated and unsubstantiated by standard scientific criteria.

On Feb. 14, by a 4-3 vote, the Torrance City Council placed its faith in modified hydrofluoric acid, an unproven technology, over sulfuric acid, a proven technology. In addition, the council placed its faith in Mobil’s ability to integrate this technology in a safe process. What happens if we discover that modified hydrofluoric acid is not nearly as safe as advertised? What happens if we discover that modified hydrofluoric acid does not conform in practice to Mobil’s “theoretical” projections? What happens if we discover these facts only after the consent decree runs its course in 1997? CRAIG KESSLER Torrance