Residual Valero Benicia flaring reportedly sends 30 to hospital on Monday
By Katy St. Clair, 05/17/17, 5:15 PM PDT
BENICIA >> A residual flaring at the Valero Refinery on mid-day Monday reportedly sent 30 employees of the Industrial Park to the emergency room, a business owner said.
“I’m not happy about it at all,” said Dunlap Manufacturing head of operations Jasmin Powell, addressing the Benicia City Council on Tuesday night. “A cloud of smoke hit us between 1:30 and 4 (p.m.). I had to send everybody home.”
Dunlop Manufacturing is an Industrial Park anchor business that makes effects units and other accessories for musicians.
Valero has been intermittently flaring since a power failure on May 5, which initiated evacuations of the Industrial Park and a shelter-in-place at two elementary schools.
“We were affected severely … and we didn’t get any notice about anything going on beforehand,” Powell said. “And no one’s talking about it now,” she said.
“I did not know about this, Jasmin,” said Mayor Elizabeth Patterson.
While some on social media have been reporting flaring since the initial May 5 incident at Valero, no further evacuations or shelter-in-place orders have been announced.
Benicia Fire Chief Jim Lydon said that he wasn’t made aware of the situation on Monday until hearing about it around 4 p.m., but that Valero had given him “no notification” that day.
“I went to the refinery in an effort to gather information, and by then, whatever had been released from the scrubber unit was basically dissipated,” he said.
Lydon said he notified the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and Solano County Environmental Health, “Who both began follow up.”
Lydon said that Valero received an other “public nuisance” citation for Monday’s emissions, but the air district could not confirm this.
Valero has not responded to Times-Herald inquiries, and no one from Valero was at Tuesday night’s council meeting.
Repost from KQED, The California Report [Editor: Significant quote: “On Friday, officials said that only two residents called with respiratory complaints, and there was no indication that anyone was hospitalized. But… Between 10 and 20 people went to the emergency department at Kaiser Permanente’s Vallejo Medical Center, according to Kaiser spokeswoman Deniene Erickson.”]
Benicia Mayor Calls For Key Emergency Improvements After Valero Refinery Outage and Flaring
By Ted Goldberg, MAY 9, 2017
The power outage on May 5, 2017, at the Valero Refinery in Benicia lasted several hours and led to flaring at the refinery. Flaring is a process that allows the refinery to relieve pressure – but it can send out smoke and toxic gas. (Craig Miller/KQED)
Benicia has to do a better job of telling its residents about major emergencies, the city’s mayor said Monday, after a series of communication problems surfaced in connection with a power outage at the Valero refinery that has caused intermittent flaring since Friday morning.
The city’s government access television station broadcast inaccurate and inadequate information in the hours after the outage and not enough residents could hear the city’s emergency sirens, said Mayor Elizabeth Patterson in an interview.
“It’s really troubling that we don’t have these things in place,” Patterson said.
The Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which is investigating the flaring, issued four notices of violation to the energy company on Friday, three for excessive smoke and one for causing a public nuisance, according to agency spokeswoman Kristine Roselius.
On Monday afternoon the district issued a fifth notice of violation for excessive visible emissions.
“Valero was preparing for start-up when smoke started coming out of one of the stacks,” Roselius said.
A Valero spokeswoman has not returned a request for comment on the district’s penalty.
The refinery’s first full power loss in 30 years started around 6:30 a.m. Friday. The outage began shortly after crews took one of two transmission lines offline to complete upgrades, said Matt Nauman, a Pacific Gas and Electric spokesman.
Circuit breakers opened after a component of a “protective relay system failed,” according to Nauman.
But the San Francisco-based energy company did not directly contact Benicia officials quickly enough about the outage, Mayor Patterson said.
“Why didn’t PG&E call the city of Benicia so that we could begin to think about the consequences of power loss to the refinery 15 minutes earlier than we were alerted by Valero?” Patterson asked.
PG&E says it did tell the city, just not as fast as the mayor would have liked.
A company representative contacted the Benicia fire chief and the Solano County of Emergency Services at 8 a.m., according to PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras, adding that utility crews worked quickly and safely to restore power in 18 minutes.
The outage caused gases used in the refining process to build up inside the refinery. To relieve pressure, Valero sent toxic gas to its flares.
Valero, like other refining companies, emphasizes that the flaring process is a safety device.
At first that process sent flames and a huge plume of smoke into the sky, which resulted in the evacuation of an industrial area near Valero and a shelter-in-place order for two elementary schools.
Even that order wasn’t clear. Initially, some authorities called for the rest of the city, except for the adjacent industrial area, to stay indoors.
“All other areas of town shelter in place. Keep doors and windows closed. Bring pets inside,” said a tweet from the Benicia Police Department.
Minutes later the agency published a corrected tweet, focusing the order on the two schools, but that was not entirely clear.
“No shelter in place for the rest of the (city) except for Matthew Turner and Robert Semple. Everyone’s encouraged to close doors and windows,” the follow-up tweet read.
On Friday, officials said that only two residents called with respiratory complaints, and there was no indication that anyone was hospitalized.
But, it turns out, the toxic air did send people to the hospital.
Between 10 and 20 people went to the emergency department at Kaiser Permanente’s Vallejo Medical Center, according to Kaiser spokeswoman Deniene Erickson.
The flaring continued over the weekend and on Monday as Valero restored operations.
“We may have some intermittent flaring as we continue through safe startup process,” said Valero spokeswoman Lillian Riojas in an email Monday.
Meanwhile, the city has begun a top-to-bottom review of its emergency response, according to Benicia Fire Chief Jim Lydon.
“There are some systems that we need to go back and look at and assess their functionality and make sure they’re working properly,” Lydon said in an interview Monday, adding that he saw complaints from residents about the emergency communication on social media.
After that review is completed, Mayor Patterson is calling for a City Council hearing to explore ways to improve emergency communication.
That hearing would also investigate why Valero does not have a backup power source, something Patterson said she was unaware of until Friday’s emergency.
The afternoon of the outage a company official blamed California’s greenhouse gas regulations for preventing the creation of an alternative power source.
Valero expanded its refinery in recent years to reduce emissions, according to Don Cuffel, the company’s health, safety, environmental director. That expansion increased the facility’s electrical load but the company never got a permit to create a “co-generation unit”.
“Adding another co-generation unit to the refinery only increases our carbon footprint,” Cuffel said at a Friday news conference.
Top 10 Stories of 2016: Benicia derails Valero’s oil-transport plan
By Daily Republic staff From page A1 | January 01, 2017
Tank cars sit on the railroad tracks, near Cordelia Road and Chadbourne Road on January 1, 2016. (Robinson Kuntz/Daily Republic file)
BENICIA — City Hall reverberated from the cheers when the City Council in September voted unanimously to turn down a Valero plan that would have allowed up to 70,000 barrels of crude oil to be shipped by rail to its refinery.
It is a topic that also made the Daily Republic’s top stories list in 2015.
Valero receives its crude oil by ship, and wanted to employ the less expensive rail option.
What ultimately became a simple land-use decision for the council, turned Benicia into one of the latest battlegrounds on the environmental and urban safety debate over transporting crude oil by rail.
Proponents noted the advances in railcar safety and emergency service preparedness, while opponents pointed to all the disasters – many deadly – that have occurred, some during the local debate.
Valero had applied for a permit to add additional rail, pipeline and to make other changes to its off-loading capabilities at the refinery, a request denied by the city Planning Commission in February. A series of public hearings were held before the City Council, but a decision was delayed while Valero took its case to the federal Surface Transportation Board, arguing the city lacked authority to make the decision.
The agency, just hours prior to the council’s decision, ruled that the city was not addressing a transportation issue, which would have triggered the long-held rail pre-emption laws, but rather was addressing the permit application only.
Valero, which represents about 25 percent of all local city tax revenue, has not indicated what its next move might be.
The Valero oil refinery operates, Friday, Sept. 25, 2015, in Benicia.(Daily Republic file)
In an email sent yesterday, Benicia’s recently re-elected Mayor Elizabeth Patterson offered the following statement on Valero Energy Corporation’s reversal of its plan to take the City to court:
Benicia Mayor Elizabeth Patterson
I am pleased that Valero called to say that they would not sue on the crude by rail project in order to maintain good community relations. They are a valuable business in our community.
I look forward to the promise of those good community relations now that we can put this ill advised project behind us.
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