Huntington Officials Fight Plan for Nearby Refinery

Huntington Beach is fighting a plan by televangelist Pat Robertson that includes reopening the offshore terminal involved in the disastrous 1990 oil spill that fouled 15 miles of local coastline.

With memories still fresh of 416,000 gallons of crude oil coating water, beach and marine life, Huntington Beach officials and residents are scrambling to keep the offshore terminal and onshore storage tanks closed.

“It was devastating. We just cannot afford to have that happen again,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Shirley S. Dettloff, who is also a member of the California Coastal Commission. “We want to find a way that we can stop this facility from reopening.”

Robertson, who last year sold his International Family Entertainment Inc. to Rupert Murdoch for $1.9 billion, formed CENCO Refining Co. in March to buy the defunct Powerine Oil Refinery in Santa Fe Springs.

CENCO also has agreed to buy some assets and leases held by Golden West Refining Co., which operated the Huntington Beach marine terminal and a 20-acre onshore storage facility off Newland Street.

The plan, said Craig Moyer, a Los Angeles attorney representing CENCO, is to reopen the 50,000 barrel-per-day refinery early next year, using the Huntington Beach terminal to pipe crude oil from ocean-going tankers to the Santa Fe Springs refinery. However, he said CENCO could still decide to procure crude oil from other sources, including an existing pipeline from a Long Beach terminal.

Residents said CENCO representatives have told them in community meetings that ships could offload oil at the terminal weekly instead of the monthly pace underway at the time of the 1990 spill.

In that spill, Orange County’s worst environmental disaster, the tanker American Trader ran over its own anchor as it moored at the offshore facility, puncturing its hull and spewing crude oil that closed Orange County beaches for weeks.

Firm, Groups Focus on Review Process

Early on, conflict over the refinery project is focusing on what sort of environmental review would be necessary to reopen facilities that have been inactive for three years.

Moyer said CENCO officials believe the project does not need to go through a full environmental impact review because the company is buying assets of existing firms that held permits to operate the terminal, pipeline and refinery.

“Powerine was an ongoing operation, so it’s CENCO’s position that there will have to be an environmental review but that they are not similar to those reviews required of new facilities,” Moyer said. CENCO officials did not respond to repeated requests for interviews.

Huntington Beach city officials filed formal opposition in August with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which must extend the lapsed Powerine permit before CENCO can begin operations.

City officials argued that Southern California’s air quality would be harmed by the project, including resumed emissions from the refinery and exhaust from oil-delivery trucks, if they are used.

“A full environmental review of the entire project, including oil supply sources, should be undertaken,” Michael P. Dolder, acting assistant city manager/fire chief for Huntington Beach, said in a letter to the AQMD.

Businesses and residents near the refinery site also filed letters of opposition with AQMD, citing a history of questionable emissions from the plant.

AQMD officials have no timetable for issuing a decision, said spokesman Bill Kelly.

“We’re studying that now,” Kelly said. “There’s also a possibility that we may hold a public meeting to give people further chance to raise any concerns they might have. But there’s no action that we’ve taken or that is imminent.”

The plans also have drawn strong opposition from the owner of the Waterfront Hilton Beach Resort, which intends to expand on land under which the pipeline runs. In a letter to the State Lands Commission, representatives for the Robert Mayer Corp. of Newport Beach, which owns the hotel, urged that no permits be issued allowing the terminal to reopen without public hearings under the California Environmental Quality Act.

But for some Huntington Beach residents, the rusting and partially dismantled oil storage tanks are a key concern in the project. Six tanks stand at the site, but Dolder said only the three largest were used for storage, each holding about 6.8 million barrels of crude oil. Golden West began dismantling the tanks, which haven’t been used since 1995, earlier this year before city officials ordered work halted because contractors failed to provide the city with demolition plans or a program for dealing with contaminated soil.

“It’s just an eyesore,” said Dana Sirdenis, 60, who has lived across the street from the tanks for nearly three decades. “They haven’t kept them up for years.”

Memories, Fears for Residents

Up the street, David and Teresa Guido said they’re afraid resumed use of the tanks could endanger their neighborhood. In the past, fumes from the tanks wafted through the streets, they said. And they fear a strong earthquake would crumple the aging tanks, potentially exposing the neighborhood to a flood of crude oil.

“I’d rather have the tanks sit there and rot,” said Guido, president of the Huntington Beach Coastal Community Assn., formed in July to oppose CENCO’s plans.

Huntington Beach officials said they would contemplate more actions--including a legal challenge--against the plans if they knew what they were.

So far, Dolder said, CENCO has offered the city no formal plans.

“We’re in a quandary as to what to do,” Dolder said. “We’re concerned about what the whole project looks like. We think this is a single project with three sites, if they’re proposing to use our terminal and our tanks. But that hasn’t been described.”

It’s unclear what other agencies would have to approve the project. Reviving the marine terminal could require permits from the State Lands Commission, but a spokesman said Robertson’s company had filed no permit requests.

If the marine terminal requires new construction, the federal Army Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency might have to review the plans also, Dettloff said.

But Sante Fe Springs officials already have signed off on the project, which could mean more than 300 jobs for the industry-heavy city, after extracting promises from CENCO to make safety improvements.

“They feel they can meet those standards, so the city has agreed to extend their conditional-use permit,” said Santa Fe Springs Fire Chief Norbert Schnabel.

Schnabel said that because the refinery has existed on the site since the mid-1950s, the city had fewer objections to reopening it than officials in other cities might have had.

“Not many communities want to start a new refinery in their area, or have a place capable of starting it,” Schnabel said. “We’ve got a 90-acre site over there that will probably sit vacant for many years to come if they don’t utilize it.”

Schnabel also expressed few concerns about CENCO’s plans to use a modified form of hydrofluoric acid to boost octane in gasoline. The compound has been targeted by environmental groups and federal regulators as among the most toxic chemicals used in industry, capable of drifting in low clouds over miles of terrain. Safety concerns led the city of Torrance in 1989 to file a lawsuit against Mobil Oil Corp. over the compound’s use at the refinery in that city. Mobil eventually agreed to use a modified form at the site.

The modified version planned for the Powerine site reportedly poses less of a threat to public health, although it has not been widely used.

Schnabel said Santa Fe Springs hired a consultant to review the effects of an accidental release of the modified compound.

“You can measure the off-site consequences in feet rather than miles,” Schnabel said. “We feel the operation up here is going to be about as safe as we can make it.”

Don May, president of California Earth Corps, said the Lakewood-based environmental watchdog group is considering several actions. Among them: seeking an injunction against opening the refinery under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, because residents near the closed refinery, which has a history of toxic emissions, were not warned that it might be reopened.

Powerine paid a $104,000 fine to the Environmental Protection Agency in 1994 over violations of the Clean Air Act, an EPA spokesman said. It also paid at least two fines totaling $20,000 for citations by AQMD in the early ‘90s. The refinery closed in 1995.

May said the group also is concerned about the safety of the underground pipeline and the storage tanks, and how the marine terminal would be reestablished.

In addition, he said, CENCO’s stance on the required environmental reviews and its piecemeal approach to getting approval for the project have left many people suspicious.

“It’s raised a red flag,” May said. “That they intend to rely on old permits [and contend] that they’re grandfathered out of a lot of these actions--that’s unsettling to a lot of people, myself included.”

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Reopening a Wound

A plan to reopen an oil refinery in Santa Fe Springs has some Huntington Beach officials and residents upset because it could mean reviving some onshore storage tanks scheduled for demolition and the offshore terminal involved in a massive 1990 spill.

Storage tanks would remain

400,000 gallons leaked from terminal in 1990