Valero Benicia Refinery closes investigation of ‘Hydrogen Sulfide Saturday’ – but Benicians are still waiting for answers

[Note from BenIndy: Valero’s 30-day report on the February 24 hydrocarbon spill, which was categorized as a “Level-3” incident due to the potential threat to human health, raised yet more concerns about the refinery’s promptness and openness in notifying the City and its residents of hazardous events. If liquid hydrocarbon was detected on Tank 1738’s roof at 4:13am, why was the City not informed “immediately,” as required by its 2019 Cooperation Agreement with Valero? What does “immediately” even mean, in this context? Questions about Valero’s emergency management and dedication to safeguarding the community, particularly when considering the health risks posed by hydrogen sulfide exposure, certainly linger. Additionally, Valero’s tweaking of the spill’s reported volume – which could be 83 or 35 gallons, depending – spotlights why enhanced regulatory oversight and wide-spanning improvements to notification requirements should be an urgent priority of the refinery, its regulators, and of course the City of Benicia. Once again, we urge readers to check out BISHO.org to learn more about the City’s push for an Industrial Safety Ordinance from the perspective of its supporters.]

Valero Benicia Refinery releases cause of Feb. 24 incident, closes investigation

Valero’s Benicia Refinery. | Pat Toth-Smith.

Vallejo Times-Herald, by Lynzie Lowe, March 24, 2024

The Valero Benicia Refinery released its required 30-day report on Monday to provide additional details about the Feb. 24 releasing of a foul odor into the city of Benicia, and announced that the investigation has been officially closed.

The incident began on Friday, Feb. 23 when a gas turbine in the Benicia Refinery Fluid Catalytic Cracker Unit tripped, causing an emergency shutdown procedures and rerouting to “slop system” tanks to take place. During this process, Tank 1738 was turned off at approximately 4:13 a.m. Feb. 24 after it was discovered that there was some liquid hydrocarbon on the roof of that tank.

By 5:30 a.m. the next morning, the report noted that the Benicia Refinery Fence-line monitors detected Hydrogen Sulfide above background levels Southwest of the Refinery that was accompanied by the signature odor of H2S, which accounted for the rotten egg smell that was present throughout the city of Benicia at that time.

“Refinery Operations began investigating the source of the odor and identified hydrocarbon on the roof of Tank 1738 at approximately 4:13 a.m. (Feb. 24) as the source,” read the report. “… Cleanup efforts began at approximately 1 p.m. and refinery personnel continued to clean material off of the tank roof until the majority of the material had been removed and there was insufficient daylight to continue. At the time the work stopped, odors were no longer being detected beyond the refinery fence-line. Operations resumed the next morning to continue spot cleaning the residue on the tank roof and cleanup was completed on Monday, Feb. 26.”

Refinery officials said their initial report estimated that there was approximately 83 gallons of refined hydrocarbon material.

“However, based on visual accounts from the personnel overseeing the cleanup of the material, it was noted that the material on the roof was a very light sheen and the roof of the tank was still visible through the sheen, indicating it was a very thin layer of liquid hydrocarbon,” read the report. “Based on the information on the sheen thickness and the area of the roof that had material, the estimate was revised to be approximately 35 gallons of hydrocarbon material. The bulk of the material removed from the roof was rainwater.”

According to the report, an investigation team – composed of managers, engineers and hourly operators from the facility – was formed two days after the incident occurred to determine the root cause and recommend corrective actions for the Feb. 24 event.

“Data was gathered from multiple sources, including equipment monitoring trends and accounts from personnel involved in the incident,” read the report.

According to the report, the investigation identified that the floating roof on Tank 1738 had slightly tilted, and was most likely caused by vapors entering the tank.

“The investigation team looked at the various sources of slop material that were routed to the tank during the event to identify potential sources of lighter hydrocarbon materials to the tank,” read the report. “From those potential source streams, there was insufficient data for the team to identify which stream was the conclusive source of the vapors.”

The investigation team did, however, determined that the volume of material on the roof was likely not significant enough to cause offsite impacts, and therefore a vapor release from the tank was suspected to have occurred.

“The investigation team also considered the possibility of other sources as the cause of the odor, but evidence from refinery fixed H2S monitors and the wind direction during the event provided evidence that the tank was the source of the odor,” read the report.

Because the investigative team believed that light hydrocarbon materials vaporized in Tank 1738 causing the roof tilt and atmospheric substances to be released, the Refinery will schedule a meeting on or before Sept. 30 with the City of Benicia and Solano County Certified Unified Program Agency to develop engineering solution for the potential slop sources and options for monitoring and alarms, procedural options, or other means to reducing potential for vapor carry under to tankage and to implement engineering solutions.

Further actions on how to proceed with corrective action will be discussed and acted on at that time but the investigation into the incident has now been closed, according to Refinery officials.


Other reporting on this recent refinery incident:

Stephen Golub: California For Suckers?

Benicia resident and author Stephen Golub

By Stephen Golub, originally published in the Benicia Herald on March 24, 2024

California Forever, also known as the East Solano Homes, Jobs, and Clean Energy Initiative, is an effort, sponsored largely by uber-rich Silicon Valley types, to build a supposedly model city or cities (of up to 400,000 people) on the large swaths of East Solano County land they secretly purchased at great expense in recent years. It currently is utilizing apparently professional signature gatherers outside retail establishments (such as Raley’s). The goal is to gather enough signatures to place on the November ballot a referendum approving zoning and other changes.

According to its website, “This voter initiative is proposing to build a new community that brings 15,000 local jobs paying over $88,000/year, $500 million in community benefits for downpayment assistance, scholarships, and small business grants for Solano residents, and a $200 million commitment to invest in revitalizing downtowns in existing Solano cities.’

But beware of Silicon Valley billionaires bearing would-be gifts.

To start with, California Forever promotes ten “guarantees” that will improve life in Solano County in myriad ways.

But when is a guarantee like this not really a guarantee? When it’s promised as part of this ballot initiative. As explained at the website of Solano Together, a group of concerned County residents, officials and organizations challenging the project:

“While the measure identifies ‘ten voter guarantees’ that the project proponents have promised to provide once residential and commercial development begins, county counsel clarifies that ‘rights to develop the New Community and obligations for voter guarantees would not vest until a Development Agreement is executed between the project applicant and the County’ (4).

A map of where California Forever plans on putting its new city in Solano County, right between Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista. | California Forever / Handout via SFGate.

“Without any mechanism to hold California Forever accountable, these ‘guarantees’ are largely empty promises until a Development Agreement is in place. Under California law, a ballot measure cannot legally obligate the County to agree to specific provisions in a Development Agreement, which must be negotiated independently between the developer and the local governing body (5). The title and summary further detail that any community benefits negotiated through a Development Agreement would only be binding if the new city remained unincorporated (6). If California Forever chose to incorporate as a city, all of those benefits could disappear (7).”

In other words, the guarantees are not guaranteed.

For these and many other reasons explained at the excellent Solano Together site, numerous officials are voicing opposition to the project. They include State Senator Bill Dodd, as well as  Congressmen John Garamendi and Mike Thompson, Fairfield Mayor Catherine Moy and Suisun City Mayor Pro Tem Princess Washington.

What’s more, consider the coalition of groups that are coming together in support of Solano Together and against California Forever. They range from the Sierra Club to the Solano County Republicans. When’s the last time such organizations gathered under a common banner?

My own reasons for doubting California Forever and its backers spring partly from the nature of the opposition and the arguments against the initiative.

But to be frank, there’s a far more fundamental factor at play: I just don’t trust them.

Beyond reading about the initiative, I’ve attended two public forums at which its leaders and supporters spoke. The first, organized by California Forever itself in Benicia in December, featured a series of statements that struck me as arrogant, ignorant or both. The capper was a claim by the initiative’s top organizer: something along the lines that high water usage problems generated by the project would be alleviated by ending almond exports to China.

Then, earlier this month, I joined about 100 other concerned citizens in a Zoom meeting organized by the Progressive Democrats of Benicia, to hear presentations from California Forever’s Head of Planning, another person supportive of the initiative and two persons affiliated with Solano Together. Again, there were California Forever claims that couldn’t be substantiated. They included promises of tremendous job generation, assumptions of “abundance” and, to my mind,  what sounded like a Field of Dreams “Build it and they will come” assertion.

The excellent Solano Together representatives, especially Benicia’s own Bob Berman (who also chairs the Solano County Orderly Growth Committee), politely poured cold water on some of the claims. For instance, what might seem like affordable housing in Silicon Valley – say, starting at $1 million – is beyond the reach of most Solano County residents. It was also noted that similar efforts to start new cities from scratch elsewhere have not fared very well.

By the way, the preferable economic and environmental alternative to the “Build it and they will come” mindset is to work with the County’s current cities, as the Orderly Growth Committee and the County’s General Plan favor, to improve what we have.

There are questions about the initiative’s signature-gathering practices. Passing by local supermarkets recently, I heard gatherers claiming that the initiative was to increase low-income and affordable housing, without reference to the overall project itself. And as reported by various outlets, California Forever representatives are being accused of misleading voters with these petitions. The  Solano County Registrar of Voters reports that it “has received multiple reports of voters being misinformed by circulators collecting signatures either with incorrect information or for a [nonexistent] petition to stop the East Solano Homes, Jobs and Clean Energy Initiative.”

The biggest question, though, involves what the California Forever backers are really after. Is it actually all about a perhaps naïve long-term dream to build a model city  or establish a new Silicon Valley in Solano? Or might it be about something much more mercenary and short-term: Get the ballot measure passed; this will change zoning to permit residential development on the California Forever land; then turn around and sell that far more valuable land (by virtue of the zoning change) to developers who’d have no interest in sticking to California Forever’s supposed guarantees?

If that’s the case, we might as well call it California For Suckers.

TONIGHT! Join one of two City of Benicia meetings to discuss industrial safety (5-6 or 6-7pm)

Industrial Safety Ordinance Development Community Meeting
Two Options: In Person or Virtual

The Benicia City Council has appointed a Council Subcommittee consisting of Vice Mayor Terry Scott and Councilmember Kari Birdseye, with Fire Chief Josh Chadwick as the appointed staff member, to create an Industrial Safety and Health Ordinance (ISO) for the City of Benicia. As part of the ISO development process, the subcommittee is conducting public outreach, gathering input from key stakeholders, and consulting with subject matter experts in the field of industrial safety.

As part of the public outreach process, the subcommittee is hosting a series of community outreach meetings. The first option is an in-person meeting at the Benicia Public Library on Tuesday, March 26. Due to the size of the Dona Benicia room, there will be two sessions of the same content: one at 5 p.m. and one at 6 p.m. Please attend only one session to allow for more participation.

There will also be a virtual community outreach meeting with the same content on Wednesday, April 3 from 6 -7 p.m. To join the meeting, visit https://tinyurl.com/yxb39xv6 and use passcode 162947.

To learn more about the project and the public engagement process, please visit the City’s public engagement website, www.EngageBenicia.com.

Clashes Erupt Over ‘California Forever’ Billionaires’ Shady Petition Tactics

Residents of Solano County are blasting misleading tactics to get plans for a utopian city on the ballot.

The Daily Beast, by Michael Daly, Mar. 21, 2024

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

A young man was standing by a folding table with a pen and a stack of paper when Claudia Wilde emerged from the Target store in Fairfield, California, last week.

“He says, ‘I have a petition… I need you to sign for better roads,’” she told The Daily Beast. “And I said, ‘That’s the name of the petition?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’”

Although the county’s roads do need work, Wilde had not heard any clamoring for improvement. She was aware, however, that a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who bought up more than $800 million of farmland in surrounding Solano County to build a new city were seeking to get a zoning initiative on the ballot in November.

The billionaires, who call their venture California Forever, hope to get 17,500 acres rezoned from “Agriculture” to “New Community Special Purpose Area” so they can develop 40,000 to 160,000 residential units for 100,000 to 400,000 residents.

But to get on the ballot, they need to collect 13,062 verified signatures by registered county voters such as Wilde. She, like many Solano residents, had been put off by the billionaires’ initial tactic of remaining anonymous while purchasing huge tracts of land and pressuring farmers who were reluctant to sell even at above market prices.

“I said, ‘This isn’t a California Forever thing?”’ the 70-year-old retired school teacher asked the man with the petition. “And he goes, ‘No, no, it’s for better roads.’ I said, ‘Let me see.’”

She took a look.

“I said, ‘This is California Forever,’” she recalled. “And he goes, ‘Well, you don’t have to sign it.’ I said, ‘This is a scam! You should be ashamed of yourself!’ And he says, ‘Well, I still love you.’”

Her outrage was compounded by what she took to be a condescending tone.

“I’m pissed,” she recalled.

She remained incensed when she arrived home and posted about the encounter on the Solano County Community Awareness Facebook page.

“I was furious that he lied about the real initiative,” she wrote.

Her post in the early afternoon of March 13 quickly received more than 140 comments. A half dozen people reported a similar experience at other locations, involving different pitches.

“Yes! They lied to me, too!” a resident named Lisa Talivaa wrote in her comment.

By Talivaa’s account, a person at a table outside the same Target had said he was soliciting signatures for a petition against “defunding benefits.” She presumed he meant Medicare, which she definitely does not want cut.

“I walked up to the table and he started pushing paperwork in front of me and said, ‘Sign here,’ and I was like wtf? I don’t sign anything unless I read it first,” she wrote.

She later told The Daily Beast that when she did read it, she saw nothing about defunding benefits, but something at the bottom of the petition caught her eye.

“It says, ‘Paid for by California Forever,’” she recalled.

The man had a number of other petitions on the table, but the one he was pressing her to sign was in support of the ballot initiative.

“And I said, ‘I can’t believe that you’re telling me that I’m signing something about defunding Medicare and you’re pushing that on me,’” she remembered. “I’m like, ‘Do you realize what this is?’ He goes, ‘Yes, I know exactly what it is.’ I said, ‘Well, then why? Why would you push that on me after I came here under the understanding that I was signing a petition for defunding Medicare? Not this shit.’”

The man said she should sign the California Forever petition so she would have the ability to vote on the rezoning.

“I said, ‘Do you hear what you’re saying to me? You’re telling me to put something on a ballot that I don’t want to begin with?’’ she said. “And so he’s just like, ‘That’s not the point… Everybody’s got a right to vote.‘ I said, ‘Well, everybody’s got a right to say no to something.’”

One of the parcels of land purchased by the California Forever backers. | Justin Sullivan/Getty

Others who responded to Wilde’s post included Gina Vasquez, who said she encountered a table with several petitions outside the Walmart in Suisun City. She said a man handed her one and told her it was to say no to the California Forever proposal.

“And I was like, ‘Really?… Are you telling me the truth? Because I’ve been seeing that you guys are lying,’” she told The Daily Beast. “He kind of just looked at me and looked away and started asking other people for their signatures. I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna read this.’”

She said the verbiage was “like word puzzles” and it was hard to decipher what the goal of the petition was. But she had no difficulty understanding the words at the end saying who had paid for it.

“It said, ‘ California Forever,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘You’re kidding me.’”

She told the man she was not signing.

“If they pay for it, it’s not to say no against it,” she reasoned.

In another response to Wilde’s post, Anita Montalbano of Vacaville said that she was leaving a Walmart there when a man asked if she was a California voter and presented her with a petition for legal measures against smash-and-grab robberies.

“I quickly scanned the information and was able to read that it was regarding smash and grab and changing the laws,” she wrote. “So I signed it and just as I finished signing and was handing him the pen, he quickly slipped another clipboard in front of that and asked me, can you sign here, please? I asked him what is this for? He said we need signatures to help with housing.”

She examined this second petition.

“I could clearly see that it said California forever,” she recalled. ”I told him I don’t know and have enough information about California forever so I’m not going to sign it. In a very forceful and stern voice he looked at me and said, you don’t have to worry about asking any questions, just sign and leave the asking to us.”

She continued, “I said, again I don’t have enough information or knowledge about California forever and the planning so I’m not gonna sign and he got closer to me and then a real forceful voice said to me ‘and I said you don’t have to worry about asking questions we will ask all the questions.’”

She told the man that he was not going to pressure her into signing .

“He looked at me like I had done something to really upset him, he quickly took the clipboards out of my hands and gave me the dirtiest look.”

Gail Zick posted that she had encountered “petition gatherers” outside a Lucky’s supermarket in Vacaville for what they called “an affordable housing initiative.”

A barn stands on a parcel of land that was recently purchased near Travis Air Force Base on Aug. 29, 2023 near Rio Vista, California | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

“I read the first paragraph & it’s clearly the CA forever!” she wrote. “I told them it’s NOT an affordable housing petition & explained it to them while about a dozen other people were listening. Sadly many voters are signing this petition without knowing what it really is!”

The affordable housing pretext is particularly outrageous when you consider something that California Forever chief executive Jan Sramek said at an “American Dynamism Summit” put on by Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm.

According to a transcript of a conversation with one of the firm’s general partners, Sramek talked about the residences that will be available in California Forever’s new city.

“And then imagine that instead of paying 4 or 5 million dollars for a mediocre home in Palo Alto or San Francisco, your employees would be able to buy a nice house for a million dollars,” he said.

When The Daily Beast told her of Sramek’s estimation, Zick replied, “Hilarious if accurate.”

The Daily Beast was not able to contact Montalbano or several other Solano residents who reported shady encounters with people collecting signatures for the California Forever petitions. California Forever did not respond to a request for comment or to a query regarding how it fields petitions.

John Gardner, the Solano County assistant registrar of voters, whose office oversees ballot initiatives there, told The Daily Beast he was unaware of problems with the California Forever petitions, but would refer any complaints to the California secretary of state for investigation.

A spokesman for the secretary of state told The Daily Beast that it had not received complaints regarding the California Forever petition. The spokesman noted, “It is a crime to misrepresent the contents or impact of an initiative measure,” adding, “Any person may file a complaint with local law enforcement authorities or our office.”

Solano Together, a coalition formed to oppose California Forever, posted online how to rescind a petition signature. Gardner confirmed that it can be done though the Voting Registrar’s office by post or email.

“It’s pretty straightforward,” Gardner said.


Voters who believe they signed a petition in error can withdraw their signature by filling out this form, then submitting it to the Solano County Registrar of Voters. Citizens can also contact the Registrar of Voters by calling (888) 993-8683. The phone line is staffed weekdays between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

>> More stories on California Forever here on the BenIndy

 

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