Category Archives: Contra Costa County

Judge halts major Bay Area refinery project for state environmental review

The Phillips 66 San Francisco Refinery in Rodeo. | Photo By Dreamyshade, Wikimedia Creative Commons.

Phillips 66 cannot begin operations at a new California biofuel refinery until Contra Costa County fixes flaws in an environmental analysis of the project.

MARTINEZ, Calif. (CN) — Phillips 66 must halt a plan to start operating a new biofuel refinery in Rodeo, California, after a San Francisco Bay Area judge said the county that approved it must fix legal issues with the project’s environmental report card.

Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Edward Weil ordered Phillips 66 to put on hold what would be one of the world’s largest biofuel refineries, to produce some 800 million gallons of biofuel products per year. The county must show that the project fully complies with environmental review requirements which he found had been violated when authorities first approved it.

Petitioners Communities for a Better Environment and the Center for Biological Diversity asked Weil to vacate his prior judgment and prohibit operations while the county works on the known legal flaws in its environmental analysis of the project. They said Weil’s prior judgment allowed the project’s land use permit to remain in place and failed to enjoin operations while the county proved its compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act — the state’s bedrock environmental protection and community right-to-know law.

The judge said in a tentative order that his prior judgment’s purpose was to allow for construction, not operations, while environmental legal issues are considered. He said that he must consider whether there is any conflict between the statement of decision and the judgment.

“There is, however, a potential conflict between the statement of decision and the judgment because the court allowed the land use permit to remain in place but did not specifically enjoin project operations,” Weil said. “Therefore, the court grants petitioners’ motion to vacate the judgment and to issue a new judgment that specifically enjoins project operations until further order of the court.”

Weil ruled from the bench Thursday to execute the tentative order as his official judgment.

Attorney Kurtis Keller, representing Contra Costa County, declined to comment on the ruling Thursday.

Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, lauded Weil’s decision. She noted that construction on the refinery can continue.

“Counties are required to evaluate, disclose and reduce the environmental harms of a project before approving it,” Kretzmann said. “Communities long suffering from refinery pollution have every right to demand maximum protections against toxic emissions and foul odors, and the county needs to secure them.”

The planned refinery is near the Marathon-Tesoro biofuel refinery in Martinez, which itself could eventually produce more than 700,000 gallons per year of biofuel products and become one of the largest biofuel refineries in California. The petitioners say that the two projects would require at least 82,000 truck trips, nearly 29,000 railcars and more than 760 ship and barge visits annually.

That increases pollution, traffic and the risk of spills and accidents from the projects, while generating and processing biofuels that would worsen existing impacts on communities nearby fossil fuel processing plants. The state considers people who live near the refineries to be “disadvantaged” because of their high exposure to pollution from existing industries. The proposed refineries would cement ongoing or increased air and odor pollution for these residents for decades, the petitioners say.

“This is a huge victory for nearby residents who’ve raised serious concerns about pollution that will come from this giant refinery,” said Shana Lazerow, legal director of Communities for a Better Environment. “Allowing this project to operate before the environmental review process is complete would’ve rigged the whole decision in favor of the refinery operator.”

Sara Evall, a student attorney at the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic, said Thursday: “The county is obligated to reassess the project based on community members’ input and an unbiased record. Rights of the public to informed democratic decision-making come before Phillips 66’s bottom line.”

The judge’s prior order, which found that the county had violated the California Environmental Quality Act by approving the biofuel refinery without properly assessing major components or adopting mitigation for odor impacts on local communities, came down this past July.

Benicia physician Richard Fleming: Comparing Solano County’s COVID numbers to other Bay Area counties

Solano County covid-19 numbers

Benicia Nextdoor, by Dr. Richard Fleming, September 8, 2021
Dr. Richard Fleming, Benicia

There are 9 counties in the Bay Area. In 7 counties, covid-19 cases per 100K are declining. In Contra Costa, the case rate has increased by 4%. In Solano, the case rate has increased by 41%. Our case rate is 59 per 100K. The next highest in the Bay Area is 35.

As far as covid-19 hospitalizations, 4 counties are flat or declining. Solano is among the 5 counties seeing hospitalizations increasing. We now have 30 people hospitalized per 100K. The next highest county is 27. Most Bay Area counties are much lower.

The mortality rate in Solano County is 32% higher than the next highest county.

As far as vaccinations, 53% of our population is fully vaccinated. The other 8 counties range between 65% and 76%.

nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

It has been said by some that we are not like the other 8 Bay Area counties. I have to say I don’t understand that statement. As far as our covid-19 metrics, it is clearly true. But I feel Solano County should be able to counter this virus as well as our neighbors in the bay. There is no reason for us to concede that we are, for some reason, incapable of protecting ourselves as well as our peers to the south and the west.


BenIndy editor: for Solano County data, go to nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/solano-california-covid-cases.html

NPR analysis of newest COVID hot spots includes Contra Costa and Sacramento counties

By Roger Straw, July 12, 2021

If you can wade through the rather “old news” introduction, this article gets REALLY interesting…  For the list of California counties, scroll down to the chart, “COVID-19 Hot Spot Counties Often Have Lower Vaccination Rates” – click on STATE and then SHOW MORE.  There’s more: don’t miss at end of article, “A fall surge is predicted“.

Where Are The Newest COVID Hot Spots? Mostly Places With Low Vaccination Rates

Health News from NPR, Updated July 9, 20212:05 PM ET
Heard on Morning Edition

As the weather warmed up this year, coronavirus case numbers plummeted, and life in the U.S. started to feel almost normal. But in recent weeks, that progress has stalled.

The vaccination campaign has slowed, and the delta variant is spreading rapidly. And new infections, which had started to plateau about a month ago, are going up slightly nationally.

New, localized hot spots are emerging, especially in stretches of the South, the Midwest and the West. And, according to an analysis NPR conducted with Johns Hopkins University, those surges are likely driven by pockets of dangerously low vaccination rates.

“I think we should brace ourselves to see case increases, particularly in unvaccinated populations,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Cases are rising in many states

The number of people catching the virus has risen in more than half of the states over the past two weeks. And 18 states have greater numbers of new infections now compared with four weeks ago, including Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Missouri and Oklahoma, where new daily cases have doubled.

“It’s an early trend,” Nuzzo says. “Unfortunately looking at what’s happening in individual states, I do worry we will continue to see national numbers increase.”

The number of people getting hospitalized for COVID-19 has also started rising again in nine states, according to Johns Hopkins: Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Texas, Wisconsin and Mississippi.

“I expect that more states would join that list in a few weeks as they continue to see case increases,” Nuzzo cautions.

Localized outbreaks at the county level

To understand what’s driving the small rise in cases at the state and national level, researchers are keeping an eye on county-level trends.

A federal team including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does a daily ranking of counties’ level of COVID-19 risk and identifies those it considers hot spots. These are places where COVID-19 presents a “high burden” to the community, measured in part by a significant rise in cases as well as increases in case positivity rates.

NPR and Johns Hopkins analyzed the current hot spots from the week of July 1 to July 7 to see how many of them have been in bad shape over a longer period. The analysis found that the vast majority of the CDC’s hot spot counties from the last seven days have seen increases in new cases compared with one month ago — 104 out of the 136 counties.

This shows that for many of these hot spot counties, the rise in cases “isn’t a blip,” Nuzzo says. “That means that they’re headed in the wrong direction” in those places.

Many of the places with dramatic rises in cases are rural areas or small towns.

For example, Newton County, Mo., has seen a 182% increase in new infections; Nacogdoches County, Texas, has seen a 632% increase. Ottawa County, Okla., has seen infections soar 828%.

Nuzzo points out that for some of the rural hot spots, the increases may be small in terms of total numbers, but that these communities typically have fewer health care resources to treat even a slight rise in COVID-19 cases.

“The ability to save lives is dependent on there being enough resources to offer lifesaving medical care,” she notes. “We could see people die from their infection that otherwise could have been saved.”

NPR analyzed counties included in a federal COVID-19 hospitalization dataset and found that COVID-19 hospital admissions rose modestly in one-quarter of these counties last week compared with two weeks ago. Nearly half of the places where hospitalization increased were in Southern states, with Texas, North Carolina and Georgia leading. Another quarter of counties that increased were in the Midwest.

Nuzzo says she’s worried about a continued trend of “localized surges” around the country.

“Most of the [hot spot] counties are in states that are also reporting state-level increases, but not all are. In fact, we are seeing counties in states that we haven’t really been worrying about — California and Washington state, for instance,” Nuzzo says.

Some of the hot spot counties are also in suburban and even urban areas. For instance, Salt Lake City has had new infections rise over the last month, as has Clark County, Nev., home to Las Vegas, and Contra Costa County, Calif., home to some San Francisco Bay Area suburbs.

The link with low vaccination rates

NPR’s analysis with Johns Hopkins illustrates dramatically the impact of vaccination rates on risk for localized outbreaks. Most — 9 in 10 — of the CDC hot spot counties that have seen increasing cases over the last month had lower vaccination rates than the average U.S. county.

Nationally, 47.6% of the U.S. population was fully vaccinated as of July 7. Rates in many of the hot spot counties with sustained outbreaks were drastically lower. For instance, Ottawa County in Oklahoma has only vaccinated about 24% of its population. Utah County, Utah, the second-most populous in the state, has about a 32% vaccination rate. The lowest rate in the list of hot spots was Newton County, Mo., at nearly 17%.

While urban and suburban counties tend to have higher vaccination rates than rural ones overall, NPR’s analysis found that hot spot counties, even in more urban areas, tend to have lagging vaccination rates. And across all geographic types, hot spot counties had lower vaccination rates. For instance, among all U.S. counties designated as “small urban” areas, the average vaccination rate was 41% nationally, whereas among the hot spots, it was 33%.

Researchers had long feared places with low vaccination rates would end up being at risk for outbreaks, says Dr. David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has been tracking the pandemic in the United States. And now that pattern is proving true, he says.

You can see this play out vividly in the different parts of Missouri, he notes. For example, St. Louis County in the metro St. Louis area has a vaccination rate of 47% of the total population and is seeing a small increase in new infections of 17% over the last 30 days. In Greene County, home to Springfield, Mo., the vaccination rate is more than 10 points lower and has seen a 275% increase in new cases.

“The emergence of the delta variant is going to mean for those areas with low rates of vaccination that they’re very much at risk to see significant increases in transmission, with potentially even exponential growth,” he says.

Some regions may fall prey to a scattering of new outbreaks, while others may stay relatively unscathed, Rubin says. For instance, he points to New York and Massachusetts, which have high vaccination rates, and so far, few new infections. “It’s like a wall has formed in the upper Northeast with regards to transmission,” he says.

But, as Nuzzo notes, localized flare-ups in unvaccinated areas could spread regionally.

“One of the things that we keep forgetting about this pandemic is that something that happens in one state is not isolated from something that will happen in another state,” Nuzzo says. “So as long as we keep seeing case increases in any part of the country, it remains a national crisis.”

A fall surge is predicted

The troubling rises in cases and hospitalizations are stirring worries that the country may be on the cusp of yet another national surge that could continue into the fall.

Ali Mokdad, a researcher with the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, says the delta variant is a “game changer” for the group’s forecasting models.

“The delta variant has changed all our projections,” he says. “It’s more likely to be transmitted, makes the vaccines less effective; previous infections are not protective. We will see a rise in cases.”

And that rise is likely to occur in the summer instead of the fall, as the group had previously projected. That’s in line with forecasts from a group of modelers organized by the CDC.

Deaths could start going up again too, by mid-August, Mokdad says. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that deaths could rise from their current rate of around 200 a day to up over 1,000 by fall.

And the burden of the pandemic, Mokdad predicts, will not be evenly shared.

“We’re going to see a divide in the country,” he says. Places that have high vaccination rates may still see small surges, he says, but “it will be much worse in these locations with low vaccination coverage.”

Things may worsen in the fall, in part because that’s when more people will be heading indoors as a result of cold weather.

No one is predicting things will get anywhere close to as bad as last winter. But researchers emphasize that any increase in deaths is a travesty, given that COVID-19 has essentially become a preventable disease.

Mokdad notes that among recent COVID-19 deaths, “the majority, 97[%] to 99% of the deaths, are among people who are not vaccinated.”

“It’s so sad for me on a daily basis to look at the number of deaths in the United States, knowing that these mortalities could have been prevented. No one — no one — should die from COVID19 while we have an effective vaccine.”

Researchers are hoping these early hot spots will be a wake-up call to communities with lower vaccination rates.

“They should be heeding the warning that’s coming out of Missouri and Arkansas and recognizing that they need to boost their vaccination rates,” says Rubin of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Nuzzo agrees. “There’s a lot more that we can do to stop the spread of this virus and to prevent people from being hospitalized or dying from it,” she says.


Alyson Hurt and Duy Nguyen of NPR and Emily Pond of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security contributed to this report.

Methodology

To categorize hot spots, NPR analyzed daily updates of all counties’ rankings on the Area of Concern Continuum from July 1 to July 7, provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sustained hot spots and hot spots were marked as such if they achieved that ranking at least once through the week.

Among these hot spots, Johns Hopkins compared 30-day averages of new COVID-19 cases to see where cases have seen sustained increases this month compared with the previous month.

Vaccination data comes from county-level counts of fully vaccinated people as of July 7 provided by the CDC and the Texas Department of State Health Services. NPR excluded Georgia, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia, because fewer than 80% of their vaccination records included a person’s county of residence. NPR used the National Center for Health Statistics 2013 Urban-Rural Classification Scheme to calculate average vaccination rates by county type, weighted by county population, both for all counties and for the hot spot counties.

NPR calculated per-capita county hospitalization rates using seven-day counts of confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions for the weeks ending June 26 and July 3. This data is provided in Community Profile Reports published by the White House COVID-19 team.

Contra Costa is 3rd Bay Area county to order fines for violating COVID health orders

$100 for not wearing a mask? Contra Costa approves fines for health order violators

San Francisco Chronicle, by Catherine Ho, July 28, 2020
Bar manager Marc Pontavella wears a mask and gloves while making a cocktail for a customer at Teleferic Barcelona in Walnut Creek, Calif. Tuesday, June 9, 2020. They Bay Area is opening at a fairly fast pace, with Contra Costa County announcing plans this week to reopen indoor dining and hair salons soon, while it reports near-record new cases.
Bar manager Marc Pontavella wears a mask and gloves while making a cocktail for a customer at Teleferic Barcelona in Walnut Creek, Calif. Tuesday, June 9, 2020. They Bay Area is opening at a fairly fast pace, with Contra Costa County announcing plans this week to reopen indoor dining and hair salons soon, while it reports near-record new cases. Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Contra Costa County on Tuesday approved fines for individuals and businesses that violate coronavirus health orders, including not wearing a mask.

The county’s board of supervisors passed an urgency ordinance establishing fines for individuals starting at $100 for the first violation, $200 for the second and $500 for each additional violation within one year of the initial violation.

Fines for businesses will start at $250 for the first violation, $500 for the second and $1,000 for each additional violation within one year of the initial violation.

“Some people are just defiant,” said Supervisor Diane Burgis. “We’re trying to get COVID under control and we need people to put on their masks. … We’re not doing it to make money, to try to control people. We’re trying to get control over this disease and get our economy back so we need people to cooperate, put on their mask.”

Contra Costa is the third Bay Area county, and the largest, to pass administrative fines for not following health measures. Napa and Marin counties this month enacted similar fines of up to $5,000 and $10,000, respectively, for businesses.

Officers designated by the director of Health Services, the director of Conservation and Development, and the Sheriff’s Office will enforce the ordinance. The county has received about 200 complaints from residents reporting businesses and individuals that allegedly broke health order rules.

Individuals and businesses that are fined will have the option to appeal the fine within 10 days.

Officials have said they are focusing more on businesses than individuals — such as if businesses are open when health orders require that they shut down, or if business owners are not enforcing mask-wearing among their workers or customers.

Several members of the public called into the virtual meeting to oppose the ordinance, saying it would curtail their individual liberties and that mask-wearing should be voluntary. Supervisors said voluntary compliance and education have not worked to keep infection rates down. Ample research shows that widespread mask-wearing significantly reduces transmission.

Sonoma County and the city of Berkeley are also considering fines for individuals and businesses that do not comply with COVID-19 safety measures.