[Note from BenIndy contributor Nathalie Christian: Benicia residents should be aware that the plume that carried the toxic dust from the refinery in Martinez reached as far as Benicia, with toxicologists collecting samples from our own city to pursue their investigation. I nearly missed this news but for someone taking the time to send it to me (thanks!). This my my open invitation for you to send me tips and heads-ups on news impacting Benicia at benindy@beniciaindependent.com. It is essential our community stay informed, and I need your help. Remember to save the date of June 13 to attend Valero’s Benicia Refinery CAP’s community presentation on its incident response. The flyer for that event is at the end of this post.]
FBI investigating hazardous fallout from Bay Area refinery
People living near the Martinez Refining Company in Martinez are under a health advisory from the Contra Costa Health Services to not eat food grown in their gardens until they have tested or replaced their soil due to a refinery accidentally release of dust containing heavy metals in November | Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group
FBI agents and EPA Region 9 staff have been going door to door in the city of Martinez, asking residents for details about the release of metal-laden dust from the Martinez Refining Co. over the Thanksgiving holiday last year.
An FBI spokespeson confirmed Friday that the agents were canvassing residents as part of a joint investigation, but referred all other inquiries to the EPA.
“EPA is communicating with local, state, and federal agencies and does not comment on any ongoing investigations,” said Michael Brogan, a spokesperson for EPA Region 9.
Martinez Refining, located on an 880-acre industrial complex on the northern edge of the city, emitted as much as 24 tons of so-called spent catalyst, a mix of chemicals used to break down crude oil into finished petroleum products like gasoline, according to the local air district.
The fallout left cars, homes and at least one school blanketed in a white powdery substance. Tests determined that the residue contained metals such as aluminum, barium, chromium, nickel, vanadium and zinc.
Martinez Refining did not immediately inform county officials about the chemical release as required by law, according to Contra Costa County Health Services. The local air district and county officials learned after receiving complaints from residents.
The health department later advised community members not to eat foods grown in the soil if their homes were dusted by the spent catalyst.
The entry of federal investigators has stunned Martinez residents who are still awaiting the county-ordered soil testing and investigations by other local agencies.“We kind of expected quiet investigations in the background. But to have the FBI come out, that was never on our radar at all,” said one Martinez resident who spoke with federal investigators and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation.
The county health department has referred two violations to the Contra Costa County district attorney’s office — one for failure to notify the proper authorities of a hazardous material release and one for illicit discharges into the county stormwater system. Both referrals remain under review.
[BenIndy Contributor Nathalie Christian: Three refinery fires in three weeks! And the refineries involved are downplaying potential health impacts and insisting there is no danger to nearby communities. Sounds a lot like the Martinez refinery incident that occurred recently, where the refinery insisted that a shower of chemical dust that reached as far as Benicia wasn’t dangerous to residents . . . just before independent parties investigated and determined that this perfectly safe dust was actually highly toxic. So who can you trust after refinery incidents like these? It is essential that Benicia residents concerned about air quality and incident response at Benicia’s Valero Refinery attend the upcoming CAP public meeting this June 13 to learn more and ask questions about our own local refinery. – N.C. ]
‘Too toxic’: Refinery fires leave East Texas residents reeling
A motorcyclist rides past Valero’s West plant as black smoke billows from a fire at the refinery on Wednesday in Corpus Christi, Tex. (Angela Piazza/AP)
Three dangerous blazes in three weeks have struck refineries and a chemical plant, leaving one dead and over a dozen injured
First Shell, then Marathon, then Valero. In the last three weeks, major fires have broken out at these companies’ oil refineries and chemical plants in East Texas, leaving one dead and over a dozen injured.
The blazes in Deer Park, Galveston Bay and Corpus Christi follow a years-long string of explosions, fires and toxic releases in a region where oil refining and chemical production is highly concentrated, often close to residential neighborhoods. And while some residents have grown accustomed to the incidents, others are alarmed by how frequently they are hitting home.
“I have grown up here and watched neighborhoods near the refineries become too toxic to live in and people forced to leave their homes due to the toxicity,” Kristina Land, a resident of Corpus Christi, told The Washington Post.
On Wednesday, a fire broke out at the Valero West Refinery in Corpus Christi, sending smoke plumes into the sky and prompting emergency responders to mobilize. The cause of the fire is yet unknown.
Land, who is 45 years old, was in her home 20 miles from the refinery when she saw the black smoke on the horizon. She had to go on social media to find out what was happening.
She blames local officials for not encouraging more transparency.
“Our local government doesn’t ever want us to know how bad [the fires] really are, so we never truly know,” Land said. “They just sweep everything under the rug and never talk about it again.”
Refineries in the Lone Star State are regulated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which did not make officials available for an interview, but issued a statement.
Victoria Cann, a media specialist for TCEQ, said the three recent fires appear to be unrelated, “but investigations are underway into the cause, response, and clean up actions associated with each incident.”
She said the agency responded to each of them by deploying staff with monitoring equipment as appropriate and has “conducted surveillance to assess potential impacts to the local community.”
The first of the May refinery fires happened two weeks ago.
On May 5, heavy gas oil, gasoline and light gas oil ignited at Shell’s Deer Park chemicals facility in Deer Park, which sent 9 workers to the hospital. The plume from the fire, which occurred right outside of Houston, was visible for miles.
The fire, which started at 2:59 p.m., blazed on and off for days — after being reignited multiple times — before crews could completely neutralize it nearly three days later.
Emergency crews responded to the fire less than 19 hours after the TCEQ hosted a hearing to expand the Intercontinental Terminal Plant — a plant near Shell which blanketed the area with high levels of benzene, a chemical linked to cancer, in 2019.
Environmentalists say the accidents keep happening because the oil industry has little fear of penalties from regulators.
“Without a change from industry … communities are going to continue to feel the effects of these chemicals being spewed out by these facilities,” said Cassandra Casados, the communications coordinator at Air Alliance Houston.
A week after Shell’s fire was contained, a new plant fire erupted in Texas City, under 40 miles away, erupted. Galveston’s Marathon Petroleum confirmed that the fire caused the death of one employee and sent two others to the hospital. Emergency crews extinguished the fire — caused by a failed pump seal — in under four hours, according to city officials.
This is the second fatal incident to occur at Marathon’s Galveston Bay refinery this year. In March, a contract worker died after being electrocuted at the refinery.
Air monitoring at the state and facility level for all three sites is ongoing to determine the exposure risks to harmful levels of chemicals. Officials at the refineries and in nearby communities said the fires were not cause for concern:
“There is no danger to the nearby community,” Shell Deer Park said in a post following the incident.
Texas City Emergency Management stated that there was no need for a shelter in place following the fatal fire and that there was no threat to residents.
Valero’s west refinery did not warrant any “action from the community,” the city of Corpus Christi said in a news release.
Over the last several years, the Environmental Integrity Project — a D.C. based watchdog group — has monitored refinery fires and emissions, in East Texas and elsewhere. Too often, local officials minimize the impact of these incidents and issue “all is well statements,” said Eric Schaeffer, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who directs the watchdog group.
Black plume smoke is usually indicative that fine particulate matter — too small to see generally — is lingering in the air, according to Schaeffer. When refineries catch fire, the chemicals from the plumes aren’t contained to the site: They drift into residential areas.
“You’re going to have a lot of pollutants released,” Schaeffer said of these incidents. “That’s probably the biggest concern for the residents.”
Please – anyone can report Air Quality issues/events to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District: General Public Information: (415) 749-4900, or Air Quality Complaints: 1-800-334-ODOR (6367)
[Note from BenIndy contributor Nathalie Christian: For a variety of reasons, the Washington Post article reposted here does not include the original’s full complement of excellent photos. If you subscribe to WaPo I recommend you read the article there. Non-subscribers may encounter a paywall. –N.C.]
City planners targeted a Black community for heavy pollution. Can the damage be undone?
West Oakland and the East Bay just after sunset on July 10, 2022. The I-880 freeway can be seen looping around the West Oakland area before winding toward the Port of Oakland. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
Washington Post, by Darryl Fears and John Muyskins, May 7, 2023
OAKLAND —Proud but beleaguered, West Oakland is easy to spot on a map.
This Black enclave — not far from the stately Bay Bridge and just downslope from the mansions of the East Bay hills — is sandwiched by three major freeways. Each day, the trucks and cars that travel these concrete corridors spew toxic pollution into yards and homes, where roughly 45,000 people live.
West Oakland is an example of how government leaders purposely deployed infrastructure to disenfranchise people of color. Starting in the 1940s, urban planners deliberately located heavy industry and truck corridors around the area’s historically black neighborhoods, according to a sitting city planner and documents reviewed by The Washington Post, along with federal and state documents.
Sheng Thao, the city’s new mayor, said it is well known that West Oakland residents were the victims of discriminatory planning.
“They definitely bore the brunt of thoughtless, damaging and absolutely racist policy decisions that were made by previous city leaders and economic interests over the course of decades,” said Thao, who campaigned on a social justice platform and was elected last November. “And we are still dealing with the fallout.”
The city is now attempting to undo that damage. Last year, Oakland announced a general plan update that, for the first time, makes environmental justice a top priority in the planning of future development. In March, the city started taking public comment on those proposed EJ policies, which are aimed at reducing pollution and increasing opportunities in West Oakland and other neglected neighborhoods.
Thao said the city is also taking action on the ground, moving two West Oakland recyclers out of the neighborhood, working with the Port of Oakland to reduce truck idling, and seeking funding to plant thousands of trees in areas afflicted by pollution and a lack of shade.
Despite these efforts, it will take many, many years to address the damage of past decades, local environmental justice advocates have said.
“Ships, trains, cargo handling equipment, trucks are now all concentrated in one place,” said Margaret Gordon, a longtime community activist and founding member of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. Residents in West Oakland continue to bear a burden, she said, because they “have the most vulnerability, the most impact.”
Margaret Gordon grew up in the three neighborhoods that make up what is considered to be the “Toxic Triangle,” consisting of West Oakland, Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, and North Richmond. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
The freeway segregation of Oakland was consistent with the U.S. government’s playbook of that era. The Federal Housing Administration prescribed building roads and other infrastructure to separate White communities from “inharmonious racial groups.”
“A high speed traffic artery or a wide parkway may prevent the expansion of inharmonious uses to a location on the opposite side of the street,” the FHA’s guiding underwriting document advised in 1938, “When a neighborhood is developed with “good housing practices,” the document said, it would be protected “from adverse influences.”
On top of that guidance, a group of all-White city leaders and state transportation officials designed the freeways of Oakland to prioritize the safety of White neighborhoods.
These planners allowed diesel trucks to freely use Interstate-880 — which runs near majority Black West Oakland — but they banned diesel trucks from a stretch of Interstate-580 that runs past the East Hills and the city of San Leandro, which were nearly 99 percent White at the time.
“The intentional planning of these uses … was historically racist,” said Jonathan Fearn, who sits on the Oakland Planning Commission. “The planning profession has to reconcile that because they have been complicit in this whole issue, not only in Oakland, but in cities all across the country.”
But West Oakland is hardly the Bay Area’s only example of blatant segregation and environmental inequity. Two other areas — Richmond, Oakland’s neighbor to the north, and Hunters Point, a neighborhood a few miles southwest in San Francisco — join it in forming a triangle of pollution in a region that has long touted its progressive credentials.
Richmond is where Black southerners fleeing Jim Crow segregation flocked to take jobs in the shipping industry during World War II. Oil and gas refineries and a large shipping port, where mountains of coal are exported, dominate the landscape.
Hunters Point housed a former Navy shipyard storing ships that participated in nuclear tests. The soil is deeply saturated with radiation, uranium and other deadly chemicals near where Black, Latino and Asian residents live.
While many communities nationwide bear a disproportionate burden of toxic contamination, in the Bay Area, the environmental injustices stand out. Residents of Richmond, Hunters Point and West Oakland cope with a legacy of pollution amid some of the most affluent and desirable real estate in North America.
‘All my kids have asthma’
On a Monday afternoon with a pretty blue sky, Gordon carefully prepared her apartment to entertain guests.
She played jazz and opened the windows to catch a light breeze coming east from the bay. But by throwing open the windows, Gordon also invited an unwanted visitor into her home.
It looked like a coating of dust atop a lamp hanging in Gordon’s kitchen. “It ain’t dust,” she said. “It’s diesel particulates. It’s dark because of the diesel particulate matter.”
Her white walls were also dark near the ceiling. “You see that gray line up there? That gray line is diesel particulates,” Gordon said, from 2.5 million freeway truck trips per year.
When she was younger, Gordon hopped on a three-step ladder to clean the residue. Now, she said, “I’m not getting on too many ladders at 75 years old. I know better than that.”
Fine particulate matter is dangerous, health officials warn. When exposed to it, people can be stricken byasthma, bronchitis, emphysema, heart disease and stroke. “All my kids have allergies and asthma,” Gordon said, “myself too.”
Emergency room visits for asthma in West Oakland are76 percent higher than the county average, according to the Alameda County Health Department. Hospitalizations are more than 85 percent higher, and death from heart disease is nearly 35 percent higher.
Emissions from heavy-duty trucks alone result “in the largest contribution to the overall potential cancer risk levels in the West Oakland community,” a California Air Resources Board study said in 2008.
When all the pollution sources are added, the “estimated lifetime potential cancer risk for residents of West Oakland … is about 1,200 excess cancers per million,” the study said.
CARB has since taken aggressive steps to reduce pollution and lower the risk of poor health and death. But health officials and activists say the substantial buildup of pollution continues to take a toll, six decades later.
The Port of Oakland sits at the edge of the West Oakland residential neighborhood, and brings hundred of trucks into and out of the area nearly every day. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
‘A disaster in slow motion’
Gordon has lived in every part of the Bay Area’s pollution triangle.
She was born in Richmond, where her father and mother moved from racially segregated Arkansas when the shipping industry was booming. They wanted jobs that didn’t involve a plow.
When the shipping economy waned after World War II, the family moved to Hunters Point in San Francisco when Gordon was about 8.
They joined a diverse communitythat spread out from the 866-acre Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Today Hunters Point, also known as Bayview, is 25 percent Latino, 26 percent Black and 36 percent Asian with a growing number of White residents, currently at 8 percent, relocating there.
Gordon’s former neighborhood was home to the shipyard for nearly 30 years ending in 1974. For 12 years ending in 1960, the shipyard was joined by the Navy’s largest nuclear testing lab.
Ships that were targets ofnuclear blast exercises were hauled to docks a few feet from a thriving community. More than 600,000 gallons of nuclear fuel was burned there.
The Environmental Protection Agency listed the abandoned shipyard as a toxic Superfund site in 1989. The Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory’s activities “contaminated soil, dust, sediments, surface water and groundwater with petroleum fuels, pesticides, heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs),” the agency said.
The Navy disputes that the site harmsthe health of area residents. Doctors who launched an effort to test families for exposure disagree.
“It’s getting to where we can look at someone’s urine and tell they’re from Bayview,” said Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a doctor whose office in the community is plastered with maps and pins showing the locations of people who tested positive for a variety of chemicals.
“The toxic burden is the same in the community whether among White women, Chinese American males or African American women,” Sumchai said.
Arieann Harrison’s own urine analysis revealed nine heavy metals in her body. Harrison’s grandfather and mother, both shipyard workers, respectively died of cancer and lung disease. She began the environmental justice organization, Marie Harrison Community Foundation, in honor of her mother. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
Arieann Harrison, one of Sumchai’s patients, pressed her nose against a fence at the old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard near her home.
Harrison believes the bay’s strong winds have blown trace amounts of contaminated soil from the base throughout her community. Sumchai and another doctor tested her urine and detected several of the chemicals found at the shipyard.
“We’ve got people like Arieann who have eight, nine, ten chemicals in toxic concentrations,” Sumchai said.
For years, Harrison’s mother, the late civil rights crusader Marie Harrison, claimed that the site was “a disaster in slow motion.”
The Harrisons lived on Quesada Street. Arieann’s sister was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27, Sumchai said. Her father suffered from prostate cancer and died of colon cancer. Her mother, a nonsmoker, died of pulmonary fibrosis at age 71.
In 2018, lawsuits started to fly. A class-action lawsuit seeking damages of $27 billion swelled to 3,000 plaintiffs. Buyers of condominiums and townhouses built near the site sued the developer for failing to disclose the extent of the contamination.
The developers erred in relying on a faulty soil analysis to press ahead with the project. Tetra Tech, a New Jersey engineering firm hired by the Navy to analyze the site and remediate any ground that was radioactive, faces numerous lawsuits.
Three years before owners started taking possession of the homes in 2015, whistleblowers came forward to accuse the engineering firm of fraud. In 2018, a judge sentenced two of its supervisors, Stephen C. Rolfe and Justin E. Hubbard, to 18 months in prison after they pleaded guilty to swapping contaminated soil at the site with clean soil from another.
From grandma to activist
After a second marriage to Ben Gordon, Margaret Gordon left Hunters Point for Oakland in the late 1980s.
Within seven years, Gordon would transition from being a maid who cleaned houses to one of the Bay Area’s fiercest environmental justice activists.
Gordon never saw West Oakland in its heyday. Janice Adam, a friend, could only describe it to her. Adam was one of the few Black kids who grew up in a suburb, Berkeley, because of restrictive housing covenants and rental discrimination that kept African Americans at bay.
But she spent most of her time in West Oakland. That’s where her grandmother lived in a big, three-level house with several bedrooms and a convenience store on the first floor.
“Oh my God, the backyard,” Adam said, “a real backyard that you don’t see in California anymore. It had fruit trees. She had chickens. We got eggs from there.”
Her cousin lived next door. “We played in the street until dark,” Adam said. “I remember the neighborhood. The neighbors really knew each other.”
After she left to attend Howard University in the early 1980s, West Oakland started to lose its pulse and its color.
Linda Lewis and her cousin Janice Adam in front of Adam’s childhood home in Oakland. Adam’s family inherited the house from her grandmother, but lost it soon after. Lewis continues to live in and own the house next door. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
The Cypress Freeway, which cut through the community and divided neighbors, left a deep wound that eventually drove residents away. The Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority also built an above ground station that ran along West Oakland’s center of commerce on 7th Street, turning its vibrant business hub into a dead zone.
Residents found it odd that BART trains ran underground through downtown San Francisco and under as much as 135 feet of water in a tube on the floor of the San Francisco Bay, only to rise above ground for a single stop in West Oakland. Customers stopped patronizing a jazz club because they couldn’t hear the music because of the frequent rumble from trains.
The trains immediately go back underground under downtown Oakland and Berkeley.
With the loss of shipping jobs and homeowner flight, the housing stock rotted. Drug crime moved in with deadly results. At the lowest point, Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton was gunned down by a suspected crack cocaine dealer in 1989.
Maceo Bell lived through it all.
Watching the decline, Bell didn’t greet BART’s arrival as an eyesore; he saw it as a blessing that brought jobs. Bell, 63, said he worked there for 17 years before losinghis job.
He inherited a house from his grandfather but struggled to pay the mortgage because he couldn’t find work. “I took out a loan I never should have took, lost a job and lost the house,” Bell said as he putted golf balls in a park with friends.
His playing partner, Frank Newton, told a similar story about house he inherited. “I couldn’t get loans,” said Newton, 65. “I didn’t qualify. I was about to lose the house, so I sold.”
Margaret Gordon arrived just before a seismic event shook West Oakland. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down portions of the double-decker San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and its connector, the Cypress Freeway.
For a second time, Caltrans essentially ignored West Oakland’s pleas against rebuilding the freeway through the community. The agency vowed to build back bigger — even though in an affluent part of San Francisco, it relented to city wishes and tore down the quake-damaged Embarcadero Freeway.
While preparing the upgrades to the West Oakland freeway in 1996, workers started in a park and unearthed a colorless, carcinogenic gas called vinyl chloride — the same toxic gas that towered over East Palestine following the Ohio train derailment this year.
Surlene Grant, who worked as a community relations officer for Caltrans at the time and went on to become an elected supervisor for the city of San Leandro, said the agency sought to minimize the threat by saying the gas was common.
“I said I’m not going to do that. They said, ‘Yes you are,’” she recalled
After the story broke, Gordon attended a public hearing on it. At the time, “She was, like, a house cleaner,” Grant said. “She was not the most articulate person,” but she knew how to raise her voice.
The Cypress Freeway was not rebuilt. Activists and city officials pushed Caltrans to rout it around West Oakland.
Areas being investigated by the West Oakland Environmental Protection Agency are marked on a map in Margaret Gordon’s office. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
Gordon, who trained with the Pacific Institute to understand the pollution risk throughout West Oakland, went on to co-found the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project with Brian Beveridge in 2004. In 2010, she was named to the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act advisory panel, and also won a $100,000 AARP Purpose Prize honoring people over 50 who are “working to build a better future.”
In 2017, California lawmakers passed landmark legislation — Assembly Bill 617 — to address the health impact of polluting infrastructure in California’s urban communities. Gordon was ready to seize the moment.
The indicator project worked with technology companies to measure pollution block by block, when few groups did that kind of air monitoring, with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District joining the effort.
At a recent meeting in West Oakland attended by Gordon, city officials discussed how they are integrating the city’s new general plan with AB 617, aiming to better regulate polluters and improve health outcomes in the community.
In tandem with the air district and other partners, the city will study housing inequality, the quality of the air people breathe indoors and whether housing codes are adequately enforced.
“Our staff is pretty excited about this opportunity to leverage our work,” said Veronica Eady, senior deputy executive officer for policy and equity at the Bay Area air district, which worked closely with Gordon on the project.
After decades of battles, Gordon is hopeful that Oakland can rectify some of the past damage. But how quickly that can happen is another matter.
“I ain’t got but 15 more years myself,” she added. “If they can’t do it in 15 more years, I don’t know what to tell them.”
[BenIndy contributor Nathalie Christian: Wow. I didn’t know that the Martinez Refining Company had initially insisted that the white powder that drifted from their facilities into residential neighborhoods was non-toxic, only for Contra Costa County to have to hit back that, no, that powder was very toxic, actually. (Benicia got a taste of that toxic powder too, by the way.) It’s wonderful that Contra Costa has the departments, agencies and mechanisms in place to ensure residents have access to answers – and remediation – after events like this. I’m linking Roger Straw’s fabulous archives regarding the ongoing saga of residents seeking oversight support for similar transgressions in Benicia just below this article. Please take a look.]
Toxicologists to determine if residents were poisoned
People living near the Martinez Refining Company in Martinez are under a health advisory from the Contra Costa Health Services to not eat food grown in their gardens until they have tested or replaced their soil due to a refinery accidentally release of dust containing heavy metals in November | Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group
Tens of thousands of people living in and around the Martinez Refinery Company still don’t know for certain if — or to what extent — they were poisoned last November.
But five months after 24 tons of toxic, dusty residue from gasoline, diesel and jet fuel flowing through the refinery first showered down on its next-door neighbors, new soil samples collected this week may finally confirm what dangers still linger there by late May or early June, county health officials announced Thursday.
People living nearby were told in March to discard any food grown in gardens and fruit trees, just to be safe.
Last Thanksgiving, the company posted on Facebook that the fine white substance that blanketed cars, porches and plants over the holiday was from a “non-toxic”, “non-hazardous” and “naturally occurring” catalyst dust expelled from its facility on the edge of town.
But within a few days, the Contra Costa County Health Department alerted residents that the ashy grit actually contained aluminum, barium, chromium and other hazardous metals — chemicals that are linked to nausea, vomiting, respiratory issues, immune system dysfunction, cancer and even death.
People living nearby were told in March to discard any food grown in gardens and fruit trees, just to be safe.
On Thursday, TRC, a Concord-based environmental consulting firm, started collecting soil samples from 14 different sites neighboring the refinery, which is located at 3485 Pacheco Blvd. Toxicologists will now evaluate the extent of contamination that residents were exposed to through skin contact, inhalation or consumption of food grown in the ground, according to Laura Trozzolo, a senior human health risk assessor with TRC.
She said the soil sample locations were chosen based on a map of where the plume of particles likely landed, using models from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District created using residents’ observations and wind simulations.
Trozzolo said that neither the five-month delay in data collection — due to the county’s lengthy contracting procedures — nor the recent historic storms that drenched the area should negatively impact lab findings.
“If we’ve had any deposition that might have landed on the surface over time, we’re still going to be capturing that within that top six-inch soil layer,” Trozzolo said during a press conference Thursday afternoon. “We do believe that we’re still characterizing and capturing conditions that occurred during that November event.”
“We’re responsible, as the oversight committee, for holding the facility accountable.” — Nicole Heath, Director Contra Costa County’s Hazardous Materials Program
Nicole Heath, director of the county’s hazardous materials program, said a 1990s-era industrial safety ordinance allows them to initiate an independent investigation and community risk assessment any time there’s a “major chemical accident or release,” such as the Martinez Refinery Co. event.
She said that ordinance allows the county to form an oversight committee, which brings together elected officials, county staff and community members with representatives from the refinery and its labor force.
“An independent incident investigation will look at root cause analyses, which would then determine exactly what happened, why it happened and what can we do to prevent things like this from happening again,” Heath said, later adding that similar chemical releases happened twice before at the refinery in the early 2000s, which was owned by Shell at the time. “We’re responsible, as the oversight committee, for holding the facility accountable.”
Meanwhile, the Contra Costa District Attorney’s office opened up a case in January on the refinery’s failure to notify hazmat officials about the hazardous release, according to Matthew Kaufmann, the county’s deputy health director.
Kaufmann said that while the health department can invoice the refinery to reimburse expenses during their investigation, the DA will be in charge of deciding whether or not the Martinez Refining Company should be responsible for financially compensating residents who lost food and soil.
Physical remediation efforts are also stalled until the upcoming lab results are complete, Heath said.
In the meantime, the county is still recommending that residents impacted by the toxic dust avoid eating any produce planted in the soil. However, gardeners are also encouraged to plant new seeds, in the event that soil samples don’t uncover any hazards.
“We are waiting to have the information from the soil sampling and risk assessment from TRC so that we can provide the answers that we know the community is so desperately, desperately seeking,” Heath said. “These corrective actions are in such a nature that they are intended to prevent something similar from happening again.”
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