Repost of Constance Beutel’s video from YouTube
Constance Beutel, Published on Mar 24, 2019
Category Archives: Air Quality
KQED: Coverage of Valero Benicia Refinery emergency releases
Repost from KQED California Report
Problems at Valero’s Benicia Refinery Increase, Prompt Health Advisory
By Ted Goldberg, Mar 24, 2019, updated at 10:05am
Benicia city officials are urging residents with respiratory issues to stay inside because a two week old problem at the Valero refinery has intensified.
“Go inside your home, workplace, or the nearest building that appears to be reasonably airtight and stay there,” reads an advisory sent out by the city of Benicia Sunday morning.
The problem began on March 11 when a malfunction involving one of the refinery’s units led to the release of petroleum coke dust.
A Valero representative said then that refinery’s flue gas scrubber was “experiencing operational issues.”
The releases prompted local air regulators to issue seven notices of violation against the refinery.
Those problems eased after a few days but continued intermittently, air district officials said.
On Saturday several Benicia residents posted comments on the social media site, Nextdoor, expressing concerns about what appeared to be more black smoke coming from Valero’s stacks.
On Sunday that intensified.
This just got more serious. The @CityofBenicia has issued an advisory for all residents with respiratory issues to go inside because of the problems at @ValeroEnergy. ‘The concentration of particulate matter has become significantly higher over the past day.’ @KQEDnews https://t.co/cdDjTcV5x1
— Ted Goldberg (@TedrickG) March 24, 2019
“(The) City of Benicia has issued (an) advisory notice for all residents with respiratory issues due to particulate matter from an ongoing incident at the Valero Benicia Refinery,” the city’s statement reads.
City officials are telling local residents with weakened respiratory systems to close all doors, windows and fireplace dampers, urging them to put tape or damp towels around doors and windows to seal them.
The advisory also recommends that healthy people limit their outdoor activity.
“The concentration of particulate matter has become significantly higher over the past day. The emissions contain coke, a by-product of the refining process that is made up primarily of carbon particles,” the city’s statement says.
Benicia officials said testing of the coke dust released so far did not show heavy metals at harmful levels but warned that breathing in air from the releases could worsen underlying respiratory conditions like asthma.
In a statement, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District said inspectors are at the refinery investigating the cause of this heavy smoke. The Air District also deployed a monitoring van to drive throughout Benicia to “gather ground level emissions data.”
This is where air quality was the worst in the Bay Area in 2018
Repost from SF Gate
This is where air quality was the worst in the Bay Area in 2018
By Drew Costley, March 13, 2019 12:30 pm PDT
Residents of San Francisco experienced the worst air quality in the city’s recorded history in 2018 because the historic Camp Fire in Butte County. The rest of the region was choking on smoke from the wildfire, too. At one point in November 2018, Northern California had the worst air quality in the world.
During the Camp Fire, Vallejo residents experienced the worst air quality of the year on November 16, the eighth day of the fire, according to the measurements taken by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). On that same day, several other Bay Area spots also recorded their worst air quality of the year.
READ MORE: San Francisco AQI jumps to 271, worst air quality ever recorded in the city
“A few really big events can really affect the air quality in the Bay Area,” Charley Knoderer, meteorology manager for the BAAQMD, said. He added that the frequency and intensity of wildfires in Northern California in recent years is “highly unusual and causes a lot of problems.”
Kristine Roselius, communications manager for the BAAQMD, said that climate change is “supercharging and exacerbating” wildfires in the region. “We’ve got more extreme weather and more extreme weather is causing more catastrophic wildfires that are larger in scale, that are harder to put out, and they put out a lot of smoke.”
Outside of the historically bad air quality of November 2018, where in the Bay Area do we find the worst air quality? SFGATE averaged the highest recorded Air Quality Index (AQI) ratings to start to get an idea of where it was the worst.
Click through the slideshow at the top of this story to see where air quality was best and worst in 2018.
The AQI is a combination of air quality measures – carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particulate matter and sulfur dioxide – taken by the BAAQMD.
Knoderer said traffic congestion is the largest contributor to poor ambient air quality. The amount of traffic in West Oakland and near Laney College, along with action along the Port of Oakland, make the air quality in the area so poor.
Ambient is a key distinction from the moments, like during a wildfire, when there’s unusually poor air quality. Knoderer pointed out that if it hadn’t been for the smoke from the Camp Fire, the Bay Area would not have had any days that exceeded federal standards for the level of particulate matter in the air last year.
ALSO: N95, P100: What do all these mask numbers mean and how do I know it’s keeping me safe?
“We generally have two seasons that affect air pollution differently,” Koderer said. “You have summer, when ozone is the primary pollutant, primarily from cars. And then you have the winter, which is primarily particulate matter or PM2.5, and that’s more local forces like fireplaces.”
Roselius added, “Wood fires are the number one source of winter time air pollution.”
The good news is that most of the monitoring stations in the Bay Area had monthly averages of particulate matter – different from the average of all of the monthly AQI highs – that were all under the federal health standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter per day.
Two of the three monitoring sites with the highest monthly averages in 2018 were in Oakland, at Laney College and West Oakland. The other was on Owens Court in Pleasanton. All three sites averaged 14.4 micrograms per cubic meter per day last year.
Complaints Over Latest Flaring Event At Chevron Richmond Refinery
Repost from KPIX5 CBS SF Bay Area
Complaints Over Latest Flaring Event At Chevron Richmond Refinery
March 18, 2019 at 1:26 pm
RICHMOND (CBS SF) – Four members of the public filed complaints with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District over flaring observed at the Chevron Richmond Refinery over the weekend.
The air district sent inspectors to the scene Sunday, and they are continuing to investigate the flaring, which Chevron said was caused by an upset in a process unit.
District spokeswoman Kristine Roselius said that so far, no notices of violation have been issued with regard to the incident, but detailed information about what chemicals were released into the air and why may not be available for months.
Roselius referred to flares as a safety device, burning very hot to protect public health by pushing the emissions high into the atmosphere to minimize their effect on nearby communities.
In a statement issued Sunday by Chevron spokesman Braden Reddall, the oil giant reassured neighbors that there was no environmental or health risk, and that flares are used to “relieve pressure during the refining processes.”
Members of the community interested in monitoring air quality around the refinery can do so at www.fenceline.org/richmond.
Sunday’s flaring is just the latest in a string of such occurrences, with eight flaring events reported in 2018 as well as incidents in January and February of this year. The latest reports of flaring
Air district officials have said each one is under investigation, but that in most of the 2018 incidents, the flares were burning off hydrogen, which burns very clean.