Grand Jury Calls for Improvements to HazMat Responses, Community Warning System Alerts for Refinery Accidents
Recommendations include hiring of more HazMat supervisory staff, placing a toxicologist on retainer, and changing CWS from an "opt-in" to an "opt-out" system
The Contra Costa County Civil Grand Jury recently released a report calling for more staffing for Contra Costa Health’s Hazardous Materials Program and modifications to the county Community Warning system to better respond to and alert residents about toxic releases from refineries and other chemical plants.
The report comes in the wake of several incidents involving PBF Energy’s Martinez Refining Co. that started in November 2022, when heavy metal-laden spent catalyst dust was released into the community starting Thanksgiving night and continuing into the next morning. MRC failed to activate the warning system in that incident as required by law, leading to a delayed response in evaluating the extent of the accident and any health and environmental impacts.
The report, which comes on top of a more detailed one focusing on broader shortcomings in the Community Warning System and its ability to respond to a range of disasters such as wildfires and earthquakes, noted that Contra Costa Health is in the process of receiving approval from the county Board of Supervisors to add three supervising hazardous materials specialists to its staff.
The grand jury noted that currently, one supervisor — the assistant director of HazMat — oversees 20 staff-level hazard materialist specialists, “making oversight difficult and hampering field operations if more than once incident occurs at the same time.”
The new supervising hazardous materials specialists “would have the authority to make binding decisions on what action to take in the field in response to a particular incident,” the report states.
The new hires, according to the report, also would provide the assistant director “with increased capacity to complete administrative tasks such as reviewing contracts for engaging third party services, such as a retained toxicologist, in lieu of supervising responses to hazardous materials incidents in the field.”
The addition of a toxicologist on retainer is another key recommendation of the grand jury, which noted the six-month delay in completing a toxicology report to determine health and environmental impacts from the spent catalyst dust that landed in the community, including to produce from home gardens. Having a toxicologist on retainer “may reduce the current delay in the public's understanding of the health impacts of a hazardous release incident,” the report says.
Referring to the spent catalyst incident, the grand jury said “the estimate from HazMat is that having a toxicologist on retainer would have saved as much as three weeks’ time to complete a report assessment of the health consequences to home garden produce as compared to the current system, which includes no retained toxicologist.”
Another key recommendation by the grand jury is to modify the Community Warning System from an “opt-in” to an “opt-out” system, in which all cellphone numbers of county residents would be automatically added to the CWS database for alerts to hazardous materials releases and other public emergencies. The grand jury found that under the current “opt-in” system in which residents must sign up to receive alerts, only about 30% of county residents are registered.
The grand jury calls for the Board of Supervisors to develop and implement a plan by the end of next year “to modify CWS so that it automatically registers all available contact data for all county residents and businesses into CWS and provides a mechanism for residents and businesses to opt out of the automatic registration process.”
The grand jury also recommends that residents should have the option to receive automatic alerts to “Level 1” hazardous releases (in which no offsite health consequences are anticipated) should they choose. It pointed to results from a survey conducted by Contra Costa Health last December and January in which 87% of respondents said they would like to receive direct information regarding such incidents.
The grand jury recommends that by the end of the year, the Board of Supervisors provide this option to residents for Level 1 incidents “that can be observed or sensed by the public off site.” Alerts are automatically sent for more serious Level 2 and 3 incidents (Level 2 alerts were only added last year). County health officials have said that had the CWS been properly activated during the spent catalyst release, it would have qualified as a Level 2 incident.
Frustration in Martinez about the lack of timely notification through the CWS about incidents at MRC led the city to create its own Martinez Alerts notification system last year so that it could alert residents directly to such incidents.
Data compiled in the grand jury report shows that PBF’s facility had the most CWS notifications covering flaring, fires, spills and other releases from November 2022 to December 2023 (see below).
Funding for the additional HazMat hires and changes to the Community Warning System can come through the Contra Costa County Certified Unified Program Agency (CUPA), which covers costs of administering the HazMat program through permit fees paid by relevant businesses producing hazardous materials, and/or Measure X sales tax revenue.
None of the recommendations by the grand jury are binding, and it ultimately will be up to the county Board of Supervisors and Sheriff’s Office (which oversees the Community Warning System) whether to implement all or any of them.
The grand jury’s larger report on the Community Warning System pointed out that Contra Costa is the only county in the Bay Area that relies exclusively on an on-call duty officer to operate the warning system, citing a 2018 survey of Bay Area emergency warning programs by Sonoma County’s Fire and Emergency Services Department.
According to the report:
With the exception of Sonoma County, each of the other Bay Area counties and Monterey County trains their dispatchers to operate their warning systems so there is always someone in the dispatch center who can operate the warning system. Sonoma County has specially trained operators similar to the CWS on-call duty officers, but also trains officers in its 24/7 dispatch center to use predetermined templates in the event of an immediate need to send an alert before the warning system duty officer can be engaged. The jury determined that Napa County also trains (its) dispatchers to operate (its) warning system.
The grand jury argues that such a reliance on an on-call duty officer places county residents at risk in the event of a major disaster such as a wildfire.
There are innumerable ways that an on-call CWS duty officer could be incapacitated, such as an accident or a sudden illness, requiring additional calls until a CWS operator can be found to return the call to the incident commander. But each additional call delays getting the alert out, and in the event of a disaster, such as a fast-moving wildfire, a few minutes additional time to send out alerts can make a difference to people in an impacted area who need to act quickly to get out of danger. In the Camp Fire, of the five staff members trained to operate Butte County’s warning system, only one was available.
Among its recommendations, the grand jury calls on the Board of Supervisors to hire a third-party consulting firm “to conduct a comprehensive risk analysis of the CWS, including its processes, procedures, contracts, hardware and software.”
Other findings of note in the report:
A sound study is needed to evaluate where, if at all, long-range acoustical devices might be effective in Contra Costa County.
Two evacuation drills in the city of Richmond in 2022 and 2023 resulted in half of the drill participants claiming they should have received a drill alert but did not, or received the alert hours later after the drill was completed.
The CWS is not tested to determine the extent to which people actually notice, read or hear alerts sent by the CWS.
The CWS staff does not have a process to determine whether first responders have read and understood the training materials it has provided them on the system.
Civil grand juries are tasked with investigating and reporting on the operations of local government, performing a watchdog function in furthering government transparency and accountability. In Contra Costa, the grand jury consists of 19 individuals, and a new one is impaneled each year. It functions as an independent body under the guidance of a Superior Court judge.
Both the Board of Supervisors and Sheriff’s Office will be required to file responses to the reports and address the findings and recommendations. The responses will be posted on the grand jury’s website (I will do a follow-up report when they are posted).
Both reports can be read on the grand jury’s website: https://www.cc-courts.org/civil/grand-jury-reports.aspx
Note to readers: In the interest of full disclosure, I filed a request with the grand jury last year asking it to investigate the Community Warning System after county officials refused to include it as part of the independent investigation into the spent catalyst release, despite a statement by the head of Contra Costa Health shortly after the incident indicating that a transparent, community-involved investigation would take place into the refinery’s failure to use the system to notify health officials and the community. I have no idea whether my request or the views that I shared with the grand jury informed any of the decisions it made or conclusions that it reached in these reports. Any member of the public can ask the civil grand jury to investigate any matter involving the conduct of public agencies in the county, particularly as they relate to transparency, good governance and accountability. Information on how to file a request or complaint with the grand jury can be found at the following link: https://www.cc-courts.org/civil/docs/GJGuideforComplaintSubmissionFinalPDF.pdf
More refinery news
The county-led MRC Oversight Committee, which was established in the wake of the November 2022 spent catalyst accident, will meet Tuesday, July 2, at 3 p.m. on Zoom. The following items are on the agenda:
Status update on the spent catalyst incident investigation report
Status update on the Safety Culture Assessment report for the refinery as a whole
Discuss and respond to Oversight Committee comments on the draft Safety Culture Assessment report
The Zoom link to attend the meeting: https://zoom.us/j/95997560137#success
Meanwhile, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or Cal/OSHA, cited Marathon Petroleum’s renewable fuels refinery on the outskirts of Martinez for violating nine safety regulations, and issued penalties totaling $188,000, in connection with a November fire that critically injured refinery worker Jerome Serrano, according to KQED.
The fire at the Solano Way facility is also under investigation by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.
According to the KQED report:
Three months after the fire, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board concluded that the blaze started after a refinery furnace overheated. CSB investigators said Serrano was sent to turn off part of the malfunctioning furnace when a steel tube carrying hydrogen and heated diesel ruptured and ignited the fire.
Serrano suffered third-degree burns to most of his body and has undergone a series of surgeries, KQED reported.
School bond update
Martinez Unified School Board members at Monday’s meeting expressed strong support for placing a bond measure on the November ballot to fund infrastructure and construction projects, following a survey delivered by the district’s bond consultant indicating healthy voter backing for such a measure (a similar measure in 2022 narrowly failed to secure the 55% yes vote required for approval of bonds).
The board, however, put off a final vote on ordering the election until next month in order to fine-tune wording in the measure’s ballot language to include a project for a new Martinez Adult Education facility, which would constitute a significant use of the funds raised through the bond.
The proposed $90 million bond measure would charge district property owners $38.42 per $100,000 of assessed valuation, in addition to the rates they are currently paying to fund bonds passed in 2010 and 2016, which have been used to rebuild or renovate several of the district’s aging campuses.