Why did emergency alerts fail during latest scare at ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance?
The city of Torrance will reassess — again — its emergency notification system after officials conceded it failed to provide timely information to frightened residents in the wake of the latest leak from the ExxonMobil refinery.
At Tuesday’s City Council meeting — as officials deconstructed Friday’s pipeline leak that sent a plume of vapor soaring over the community — City Manager Leroy Jackson said the reverse 9-1-1 system was overwhelmed by the number of automated phone calls it was trying to make.
The Torrance Alerts system — a two-decade old technology — is capable of putting out only 200 telephone calls at a time, meaning the city got in a “bit of a scramble,” Jackson said.
“What we’ve found is when you go to a citywide alert you’re covering an awful lot of area,” Jackson said. “The system literally went into a spin because of the size of the area.”
It took until 7:27 p.m. — more than an hour after the leak began — until the telephone notification was “pushed out.”
It’s unclear why city officials didn’t figure that out in the 20 years since the system was put into operation. Municipal officials didn’t address that issue.
Indeed, the emergency response was bungled from the outset, it was revealed during the meeting review.
A passing off-duty firefighter — not ExxonMobil — first called 9-1-1 to report what appeared to be a refinery fire at 5:50 p.m. as he drove along Crenshaw Boulevard.
It was unclear why the refinery didn’t report the incident to the city initially. No ExxonMobil officials addressed the panel, but Councilman Tim Goodrich was clearly unimpressed.
“I guess we got lucky — again,” he said.
Many residents complained they received no notification of what was going on while emergency refinery sirens wailed, leaving them in the dark about the nature of the incident at a refinery with well-publicized safety issues.
Jackson said officials will review the “phone-first concept” of notification, especially since text messages some residents signed up for were “garbled” in the wake of the leak, too.
Councilman Mike Griffiths criticized the city response as well.
“I had residents calling me and texting me and seemed to know more about it than I did,” he said. “I felt like I should have had that information as fast as possible.”
Officials did not address why regional media were not told more about the incident quicker.
The siren system also will be reviewed since a “peculiarity” meant some residents far away from the refinery could hear the sirens while some of those very close by — and in the area where people were asked to shelter in place — could not.
“The alarm system is working great; we just have to adjust our responses,” Jackson said.
Griffiths also suggested more information needed to be provided to the city’s daytime population of nonresidents when sirens are activated.
“They hear this thing, they have no idea what to do,” he said. “That created some panic on their part.”
The city of Torrance came under fire for its emergency notification procedures — or lack thereof — in the wake of the Feb. 18 explosion at the refinery.
At least one resident questioned why those hadn’t improved in the intervening months.
Comments