Alarm Over Health Risks From Latest Refinery Incident Dissipates, but Questions Over Delayed Public Notification Remain
Lab results from coke dust that drifted beyond MRC property on Tuesday show no ongoing health risks, but delays in notifying health authorities, public remain under investigation and scrutiny
MONDAY UPDATE: MRC’s 72-hour report on the incident can be accessed at this link: https://cchealth.org/hazmat/pdf/MRC-Incident-2023-0711-72hr-report.pdf According to the report: '“At approximately 8:52 a.m. on July 11, during the routine removal of petroleum coke from a coke drum, MRC had an unintentional release of petroleum coke dust for less than one minute. The release occurred when hot coke was moved from a drum into a coke pit where it contacted water, creating steam with petroleum coke dust which was carried by wind into the residential area east of the refinery.” The report does not explain the delay in activating the Community Warning System, though it does detail various attempts to reach county and regulatory officials.
Community alarm over the latest chemical release from the Martinez Refining Company on Tuesday largely dissipated on Friday when Contra Costa County health authorities announced that test results from the “coke” dust that drifted beyond the refinery’s gates showed “there is not an increased risk to public health.” But questions remain about the lack of timely notification from MRC and the county about both the incident itself and its scope and severity.
Unlike Tuesday, Contra Costa Health Services (CCH) specified in an email update sent to refinery neighbors on Friday morning that the release registered as a “Level 1” alert through the Contra Costa Community Warning System, “which is the system’s lowest-level alert, used for hazardous materials releases when there are no expected off-site health consequences.”
Upon learning of the release at 10:20 a.m., CCH dispatched hazardous materials staff to investigate the incident and determine whether it posed any ongoing threats to public health.
“Investigating agencies responding after the release did not detect any immediate cause for concern about community health, so the community warning system alert level was not changed,” the CCH email read.
However, that context was largely missing in Tuesday’s communications by health authorities and media coverage of the incident, which lasted only about a minute. The public and media response seemed to belie the reality of what seems to have been a relatively minor incident as refinery mishaps go.
The reaction was largely a reflection of ongoing frustration with MRC and concern about its safety practices in the wake of the much more serious “spent catalyst” accident starting on Thanksgiving night that lasted for hours and spewed 20 to 24 tons of toxic dust on the surrounding community. The Community Warning System was never activated for that release, apparently the first time such a failure has occurred since the CWS was created about 30 years ago, which MRC has attributed to an inability by refinery staff to detect the release when it occurred. In January, the District Attorney’s Office agreed to look into possible charges against the refinery for its failure to notify it and the public of the release; six months later, the D.A. has not announced when such a decision will be made.
There have been a series of incidents at MRC since the Thanksgiving spent catalyst release, none registering higher than Level 1 on the Community Warning System. A review of hazardous materials incidents on the Contra County Hazardous Materials Program website lists six events at MRC since the Thanksgiving accident, not including Tuesday’s. By contrast, Chevron’s Richmond refinery has reported three incidents, all triggering Level 1 alerts, during that period.
While MRC did activate the CWS for Tuesday’s incident, the delay in doing so has come under scrutiny. There have been conflicting reports of when the release actually occurred (CCH has reported that it happened about 8:30 a.m., while MRC says 9), but regardless, there was a delay of over an hour between when the dust drifted off the refinery’s property and when the warning system was activated. A major question is whether MRC failed to immediately detect the release, which it cited as the reason for the failure to notify in November.
MRC was required to file a 72-hour report on the release by the end of the day Friday; CCH said in its email update that it would review the report and post it to its website at cchealth.org/hazmat on Monday (check for an update to this post after the report becomes available).
“This report will include additional details about how and why the release occurred and how MRC responded,” CCH said.
In its Friday update, CCH also said its hazardous materials division and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District “are each conducting investigations to determine whether the July 11 release from MRC violated regulatory laws relating to public and worker health and safety, and air pollution standards, respectively.
“As part of its investigation of this incident, CCH will also determine whether MRC properly followed the county’s notification policy and properly used the Community Warning System, as required by law.”
Beyond the delay in MRC reporting the incident to health authorities, there also remain questions about the timeliness and adequacy of communication from CC Health to the Martinez community. Other than a short social media post about the incident, there was no official word by CCH on relevant county websites or in direct communications to Martinez residents about the release for several hours on Tuesday, and community concern was stoked by some alarmist media coverage that failed to note the context that this was a “Level 1” incident where no off-site health consequences were expected.
In contrast, Bay Area media initially showed only limited, often superficial interest in the much more significant Thanksgiving night release and notification failures. It was only in March, when community alarm spread over a health advisory issued by CCH warning residents not to eat fruits and vegetables from impacted gardens until soil testing could be conducted, that intensive scrutiny of the episode from not only Bay Area media but the Los Angeles Times took off; the results of the testing in June showed no reason for concern over soil safety, and the advisory was lifted.
When the media did begin reporting extensively on the spent catalyst incident, it largely fixated on the concerns about its impact on soil and produce, as well as community anger, and glossed over why the warning system failed and the public was not directly notified in the first place, leaving residents in the dark and exposed to breathing the dust while it was airborne.
The community alarm that spread in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s incident prompted the city of Martinez to fast-track its new Martinez Alerts notification tool for emergencies, which wasn’t expected to roll out until this coming week, and send an alert via email to subscribers of the city’s newsletter shortly after 3 p.m. Shortly thereafter, CCH forwarded a brief media release on the incident to residents, but the email failed to note that the Community Warning System alert was the lowest level where no immediate impact on public health is expected.
Internet searches of petroleum coke dust quickly turned up data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that it contains only trace levels of toxic materials and has “low health hazard potential in humans,” but that context was also missing from the communications by CCH Health and media reports (indeed, a San Francisco Chronicle article quoted sources who seemed to exaggerate the potential health impacts of this release and cherry-picked an EPA statement related to “fugitive dust and coke storage and handling operations” that did not seem relevant to this incident).
Friday’s email update from CCH made clear that coke dust is “chemically similar to charcoal” and that the primary health concern from such a refinery release is “irritation to the throat, lungs and the respiratory system while the release was occurring and the material was in the air, particularly for people with respiratory conditions such as asthma.”
In Tuesday’s email, however, CCH did not provide any such details on the known toxicity of coke dust, saying only that “CCH’s Hazardous Materials team is working to assess potential health impacts.” In contrast, the dust from the spent catalyst release in November contained high levels of metals that can be toxic to humans.
Meanwhile, the shortcomings of the Community Warning System in not only communicating in a timely fashion the existence of a refinery incident but its scope and severity have been an ongoing concern since the November release and a major flaring incident that occurred a few weeks later.
As major Contra Costa County refinery incidents have become much less frequent over the years, along with accompanying shelter-in-place orders through the CWS, the focus has steadily shifted to whether, and how, to communicate lower-level incidents to the public without causing unwarranted community alarm. An historical list of major Contra Costa refinery and chemical plant accidents on the Hazardous Materials website shows a spate of fires and other major chemical releases in the 1990s, some of which sickened thousands; that number has slowed to a trickle in recent years, with the the last major incident that caused widespread health impacts occurring in 2012 from a fire at Chevron’s refinery.
And despite the intense scrutiny that MRC has come under since the spent catalyst release, the historical record shows that multiple incidents of comparable severity occurred under Shell’s ownership in the decade before the refinery was sold in 2020 to PBF Energy. The main difference seems to be that the Community Warning System worked as intended during the Shell accidents and failed during the spent catalyst release.
In Tuesday’s email sent by CC Health more than five hours after being alerted to the incident, county Supervisor Federal Glover, who represents Martinez, expressed concern about the delay in MRC notifying the county about the incident and said “timely notification is critical.” But he did not address the county’s own lack of timely notification to the public about the incident itself, including the fact that it was a low-level incident with no expected health impacts for the community.
The issue of timely communication to the public was clearly on the mind of Glover and fellow supervisor John Gioia during an April meeting of the county Board of Supervisors’ ad hoc committee that oversees the Community Warning System. The two supervisors then discussed with staff the possibility of using text messaging for certain Level 1 alerts at the discretion of CC Health to give the public more timely and accurate information. The discussion centered on flaring events lasting more than 20 minutes or incidents with odors, in which cases the only current communication protocol is to post a notice on Contra Costa Health’s website (such a notice wasn’t posted for the coke dust incident, apparently because it didn’t meet the criteria of lasting more than 20 minutes or involving odors).
The discussion also addressed allaying the type of alarm that swept the community during Tuesday’s incident. Gioia noted during the discussion that in certain Level 1 incidents such as extended flaring events, “we do get questions from the public wanting to know what’s going on even if there is no off-site impact. It would seem to me that there may be a need, depending on the circumstance, for the health department to send out a text message notification at its discretion.”
Glover agreed with Gioia’s idea to implement the option for text messaging for certain Level 1 events, saying, “As much as we are able to allow the public to have that ease of mind that OK, this is going on but it’s minor, so that they have that comfort … I think it makes sense.”
But when Deputy Health Director Matt Kaufmann asked whether the supervisors wanted to move forward with such a change immediately, Glover said to hold off. “If you could put that in place and bring it back to us for final approval, that would be great.”
Kaufmann then said CC Health staff would “set up a process to look at the Level 1s and make a recommendation to this body at the next meeting.” The ad hoc committee has not met since.
If the supervisors had authorized CC Health to send text messages for certain Level 1 incidents in April, it’s unclear whether that would have made a difference in the communications around Tuesday’s incident, because the discussion was specifically related to flaring events lasting longer than 20 minutes or incidents involving odors, not the type of dust release that occurred Tuesday.
In an email to the supervisors and committee staff members following Tuesday’s incident, I asked whether the county had moved forward with this new text messaging proposal and/or would expand it to include events such as the coke dust release.
“Our committee gave direction to Contra Costa Health staff on this issue, and it is coming back for action at our next (Industrial Safety Ordinance) Committee meeting. So there is nothing we can add today until the next meeting occurs,” Gioia replied.
The next meeting has been tentatively scheduled for July 27, but Gioia said he and Glover have a scheduling conflict that morning to review the county’s Head Start program with federal regulators and that they are trying to reschedule it for the afternoon.
Meanwhile, a presentation by CCH’s hazardous materials program on the coke dust release is scheduled for Wednesday’s City Council meeting, which starts at 7 p.m. and will be accessible via Zoom as well as in person at City Hall. Police Chief Andrew White will also provide an update on the rollout of the Martinez Alerts emergency notification tool at the meeting. The link to the meeting agenda and Zoom login information: https://martinez.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=martinez_578ffcc4e3741e5345860237cf3805a2.pdf&view=1
MRC Oversight Committee meeting
The next meeting of the MRC Oversight Committee investigating issues related to the November spent catalyst release is scheduled for Aug. 10 at 10 a.m. via Zoom. CCH’s email update about the coke dust release on Friday also noted that the oversight meeting will include an update on that incident as well as one from the D.A.’s Office into its investigation of MRC’s failure to activate the Community Warning System during the spent catalyst release and whether charges for legal violations are warranted.
As was reported in last week’s newsletter, CCH has decided that issues related to the refinery’s failure to activate the warning system and immediately notify county health authorities will not be included in the independent “root cause” analysis of the release to be conducted by outside consultant Scott Berger and Associates, citing the fact that the matter is under review by the D.A. (see last week’s newsletter for a commentary by me on why I believe that decision is unjustified and runs counter to CCH’s promise to conduct a transparent, “community-involved” independent investigation into the incident).
The FBI and EPA have also launched investigations into the spent catalyst incident, without any word to date on what, if anything, those probes may yield.
In an emailed statement on Tuesday’s coke dust incident, Councilman Satinder Malhi said that “it is my sincere hope that Contra Costa County Health (CCH) and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), along with the additional agencies investigating the November 2022 incident which also includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office, will move in an expeditious and thorough manner to hold MRC accountable to the greatest extent permitted under both civil and criminal law in order to protect the future health and well-being of our residents.”