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Why are Torrance refinery activists unhappy over long-awaited meeting Monday?

 This article will be in the Daily Breeze print edition on Thursday,
September 15th.  The link is at the bottom of the article.

John Bailey, President
Southeast Torrance Homeowners' Association, Inc. (SETHA)

By Nick Green, Daily Breeze

Posted: 09/14/16, 9:06 PM PDT | Updated: 1 min ago
0 Comments

Local activists concerned about a catastrophic release of toxic chemicals
from the Torrance refinery will finally get their wish Monday — a public
meeting in town with industry regulators.

But they’re pessimistic about how useful it will be.

Hoping for a dialogue so they can present technical information they believe
shows the risk of such a disaster is understated, the activists fear instead
they’ll be greeted with a PowerPoint dog-and-pony show with government
officials talking at them rather than with them.

The Environmental Protection Agency and South Coast Air Quality Management
District have scheduled the meeting from 10 a.m. to noon Monday at the Ken
Miller Recreation Center Auditorium in the Torrance Cultural Arts Center,
3330 Civic Center Drive.

Up for discussion is the Torrance refinery’s federally mandated Risk
Management Plan, which supposedly analyzes what could happen in a
worst-case-disaster scenario.

The EPA announced in December 2015 it had opened an investigation into
whether ExxonMobil, which then owned the refinery, had misrepresented the
risk of a disaster to the community involving highly toxic hydrofluoric
acid.

In the wake of a February 2015 explosion that crippled the plant, federal
regulators said only pure chance prevented a release of the acid that
creates a toxic cloud with the potential to kill or injure tens of
thousands.

Kay Lawrence, chief of emergency prevention and preparedness, and Enrique
Manzanilla, Superfund division director for U.S. EPA Region 9 will discuss
Risk Management Plans (RMPs), said EPA spokeswoman Nahal Mogharabi.

“Kay will briefly give an overview of our investigation but won’t be able to
really discuss next steps or conclusions, as the enforcement investigation
is still ongoing,” Mogharabi said.

That lack of engagement is exactly what members of the Torrance Refinery
Action Alliance and Families Lobbying Against Refinery Exposures had sought
to avoid when they requested the meeting back in July.

“It’s infuriating,” said Torrance resident Catherine Leys, co-founder of
FLARE. “It’s going to be a presentation to the public rather than us voicing
our scientific concerns about a potentially flawed RMP.”

The meeting was scheduled by the AQMD officials, who also will make comments
and offer presentations, including one on the district’s study on possible
commercial alternatives to the use of HF.
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Leys noted both agencies appear to communicate privately with ExxonMobil and
other companies they are supposed to be regulating, yet declined to give
TRAA or FLARE the same courtesy, saying that as a public agency the meeting
should be open to the public.

Fire Department and city of Torrance officials, who signed off on allowing a
reduction in the amount of an additive intended to make hydrofluoric acid
safer — but never disclosed that to the community — also will attend the
meeting.

The meeting will be held in a large auditorium open to the public, not in a
small conference room as activists had hoped so they could share the highly
technical data they have uncovered.

Sally Hayati, president of TRAA, fears that will merely serve to “dilute the
message” activists want to communicate.

A retired rocket scientist, Hayati has spent hours pouring over voluminous
technical reports on her own time and consulted with a handful of industry
experts to reach the conclusion that the risk to local residents from the
refinery is understated, perhaps deliberately.

She has studied the RMPs for the Torrance refinery and Valero’s Wilmington
refinery, the only two in the state that still use HF, and discovered
discrepancies and inconsistencies between the two.

The two plans differ, for example, on the amount of HF each would release in
a worst-case disaster and how far the toxic cloud that would be produced
would travel.

And both plans appear to far understate the average toxic distance of the
cloud from the refinery that would cause deaths or irreversible injury in
comparison to disaster plans at other plants, reducing the scale of the
disaster, she said.

The plans are written by the owners of the refinery, who insist they have
followed EPA guidelines.

Experts in the field have previously cast doubt upon that.

“The EPA is basically letting them get away with it by not questioning their
reports,” Hayati said. “They don’t do any independent verification.

“We have evidence they did not develop a safe modified hydrofluoric acid or
even a less deadly modified hydrofluoric acid yet these reports are allowed
to be completely inaccurate,” she added. “It’s not clear to me (the EPA)
even understands what the issues are.”


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