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Answers sought in refinery explosion

Agencies looking into whether situation was handled appropriately

Tuesday, December 28, 1999

By Brent Watters Staff Writer

Officials from the Illinois attorney general's office, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration expect to have a better understanding today of what caused the Friday explosion at the Blue Island Clark Oil refinery.

"We've got our chief engineer and two of our consultants with a list of others out there to scrutinize and analyze the situation in order to see what needs to be done," Jerry Owens, spokesman for the attorney general's office, said Monday.

IEPA spokesman Dennis McMurry said "no stone will be left unturned" as part of his agency's investigation into the explosion.

Clark officials did not return several phone calls Monday.

Outside of trying to determine what caused the explosion, McMurry said the IEPA is also trying to determine if Clark had handled the situation appropriately.

McMurry said that in most cases involving accidents at the refinery, Clark officials are required to contact either representatives with the Illinois Emergency Management Agency or the IEPA.

"As far as I know, Clark had not notified anyone. We found out about the accident through media reports. But we have to see if this is correct," McMurry said.

Friday afternoon's explosion involved a platformer, a processing unit that makes high-octane gasoline, Clark officials said Saturday.

The plant is located at 131st Street and Kedzie Avenue in unincorporated Worth Township and produces 55,000 gallons of gasoline a day.

Clark officials said the incident started when water that had leaked into a gas pipeline froze, leading the pipe to rupture and causing the explosion about 12:30 p.m. Friday.

Witnesses said the ruptured gas line shot flames at least 100 feet into the air, but Clark officials characterized the incident as a "small fire."

The explosion injured one employee, who was treated for a stiff neck at Palos Community Hospital in Palos Heights and released, refinery officials said.

Clark officials said no chemicals were released during the explosions, but McMurry and Owens said their agencies have yet to verify that claim.

The refinery had been the site of other fires and incidents in past years and is the subject of pending lawsuits by the attorney general's office and the U.S. Department of Justice.

While the various agencies look for answers regarding the explosion, Joan Silke said she wants answers as to why Clark's Community Alert Network, or CAN, system was not activated.

"The residents of this town should have been notified of what was going on. We should have been told whether or not we should panic because people were shook up from that explosion," Silke said.

She is the chairwoman of the Good Neighbor Committee, a group of Blue Island residents that keep tabs on the refinery's operations.

The CAN system uses a computerized telecommunications system to simultaneously place hundreds or thousands of prerecorded warning phone calls to residents living around the refinery in the event of an accident.

If an accident occurs, Clark is supposed to notify local police and fire officials, who would decide whether or not to activate the CAN system.

"The system only works when it is activated, so why wasn't it?" Silke said.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), December 28, 1999

Answers

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Clark Oil accused of 'inconsistencies'

Citing past, refinery says Y2K power outage unlikely

Thursday, December 23, 1999

By Brent Watters Staff Writer

During a federally mandated meeting earlier this week, Frank LaPointe, manager of the Clark Oil refinery in Blue Island, and other company officials said Clark is not concerned about losing electricity at the refinery, especially as a result of Y2K, because there hasn't been a power outage at the plant in more than 30 years.

But in October 1994, a power outage at the refinery caused a valve to stick and emit an aluminum oxide dust into the air for 30 minutes. Nearly 50 students from nearby Eisenhower High School were treated for respiratory problems at area hospitals and three had remained hospitalized for three days.

In March 1995, another power failure at the refinery caused an unknown amount of sulfur dioxide to be released into the air and caused the plant to be shut down temporarily.

Local environmentalists and residents who attended Monday's meeting said Clark's inaccurate statements about power losses are indicative of the problems with the information the company released  or failed to release  at Monday's meeting.

"They were holding that meeting because they were forced to and they were doing it reluctantly. There was and always has been inconsistencies in the information that Clark releases," said Joan Silke, a Blue Island resident and member of the Good Neighbor Committee, which formed with the purpose of learning more about the refinery.

LaPointe did not return phone calls Tuesday and Wednesday.

Under a provision in the federal Clean Air Act passed in 1990, companies such as Clark that handle large amounts of any one of 140 potentially hazardous chemicals were required to implement a risk-management program. An August 1999 amendment to the act required companies to hold a public meeting to discuss their worst-case scenarios and their risk-management plans.

This summer, the scenarios and maps were to have been made public via the Internet, but industry convinced Congress to delay their release for at least a year due to terrorism concerns.

Environmentalists such as Lionel Trepanier, a member of the Chicago Greens, said they were outraged at how Clark officials downplayed the dangers of the potentially hazardous hydrofluoric acid that is used at the plant as they discussed their hypothetical scenarios Monday.

"It was ludicrous. They basically said hydrofluoric acid was not that hazardous and that people could easily be treated if they were exposed to it," Trepanier said.

Hydrofluoric acid, also called hydrogen fluoride, is used as a catalyst in a process to boost the octane of gasoline.

Newer refineries have moved away from using the chemical, in part because of the acid's potential to cause a catastrophic accident like the one that killed 2,000 people and injured more than 100,000 near a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India in 1984. The Bhopal release involved a different chemical, methyl isocyanate.

But experts like Abby Jarka, staff engineer for Citizens for A Better Environment, say hydrofluoric acid can be just as lethal under certain circumstances.

"It is the most dangerous chemical refineries use. High concentrations of it are considered immediately dangerous to life and health," Jarka said.

The worst-case scenario discussed by Clark involved an accidental release of 235,000 pounds of hydrofluoric acid over ten minutes without any chance for the company to intervene to stop it.

LaPointe said such an accident "would never happen."

Clark officials said Monday that such a leak would impact an area within a 19 to 25 mile radius downwind of the refinery.

But Clark officials refused to define what kind of impact a major release of hydrofluoric acid would have on people within the danger zone, although the company was required by law to make that assessment in preparing its worst-case scenario plan.

But Silke said from her research she knows what the impact would be.

"Anyone who knows about hydrofluoric acid knows 'total impact' means 'dead' and for the rest it means severe health problems. I don't know why they don't want to discuss what could happen. It was part of what they were supposed to do," Silke said.

Though the company was required to have such information prepared, Clark officials were unable to say how many people would be "impacted" by such a catastrophic release if one occurred.

"I don't know if they didn't properly prepare their risk management plan or if they didn't give people the whole story," said Jarka, who did not attend the meeting.

Clark officials said the company would take full responsibility for any accident that took place.

But they said a more realistic accident scenario would involve 170 pounds of hydrofluoric acid leaking for 30 seconds from a severed 2-inch-diameter, 10-foot-long transfer pipeline.

Clark officials said that remote-controlled, high-pressure water hoses would eliminate 90 percent of the fumes that would be released and the remaining substance would travel less than a tenth-of-a-mile and would not cause "great harm" to anyone who came in contact with it.

"That means it would not affect the students at Eisenhower High School," LaPointe said during the meeting.

LaPointe's statement was taken with grain of salt by the environmentalists who had questioned Clark officials about past accidents that affected the high school, which is located less than a =-mile from the refinery.

Environmentalists used as an example a May 1995 incident when 15 pounds of hydrofluoric acid leaked from a corroded pipe at the refinery and led the high school to send 15 students  who had complained of eye irritation, nausea and headaches  home for the day.

It was one of two incidents that prompted judge to order the temporary shutdown of all or part of the refinery. It also prompted the state to require Clark to install the remote-controlled, high-pressure hoses.

When activists inquired about that accident, Clark engineer Dan Sanders responded that "students go home everyday from school."

Such answers only added to the agitation of the handful of environmentalists and residents were unhappy with the way Clark conducted the meeting.

"It was most informal public meeting I have ever been to. The worst part of it was when they had Santa Claus come in the room. I could hardly believe it," Silke said, referring to a Clark employee dressed as Santa Claus who wandered around the meeting room.

Outside of the appearance of Santa Claus, some attendees were dismayed that the company did not make any formal presentation at the meeting, and that the event was set up like a science fair, with Clark representatives answering questions for individuals while standing in front of small displays.

LaPointe said members of Clark's Community Advisory Panel, which is made up of area residents, had suggested that the meeting be set up in that manner to provide more one-on-one discussions.

But the advisory panel has been criticized by local environmentalists who say Clark has purposely excluded them from taking part in the panel in order to create a group that won't question the company's information.

Jarka said she was surprised to hear about how Clark conducted the meeting.

"I have attended other such meetings and for the most part they were all done with a presentation and question-and-answer session. Most companies had the answers people wanted readily available and if they didn't they made a commitment to get back to people," Jarka said.

Hank Naour, an official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, called the structure of Monday's meeting  which he did not attend  "unfortunate."

"The point of these meetings were to not skirt the issues but have answers ready for the public. By not doing so a company only puts themselves in a bad position because people will feel that someone is hiding something from them and trust is lost," Naour said.

Unfortunately, standards for how the informational meetings are to be run have not been set by Congress, Naour said.

"This is a new process. We are relying on the companies to understand the intent of the meetings and respect the spirit of the agreement in hosting these meetings," Naour said.

While overall Silke was dismayed at how Clark presented its information at the meeting, she came out of it encouraged that it could lead to a better exchange of information between her group and the company.

"The doors had been closed for a while but I was told that this meeting would kind of mark a new point in our relations. We'll see," Silke said.

While Silke walked away from the meeting somewhat encouraged, Trepanier said he plans to file a complaint with the EPA because he doesn't believe the meeting met the federal requirements.

Naour said that though Congress has not set standards for how the informational meetings should be run, Trepanier is free to voice his dissatisfaction.

"I encourage people to call or write letters to myself and officials at the U.S. EPA Region Five office if they are not satisfied with the meeting and we'll look into the situation," Naour said.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), December 28, 1999.

Whoaa! Fortuitious timing on that last Clark Refining post 5 days ago Homer.

This refinery explosion is gonna be different because they'll hafta shut the refinery down completely. Clark has taken too much heat on operational, environmental, PR, and undercapitalization problems. The heat was on Clark before this explosion. So scratch another 80,000 bls a day from total US refining capacity in an already tight market.

Did that last link get away from you Homer? Will I'll try my first ever HTML hotlink. Here goes:

Clark Oil Accused of Inconsistencies Thread

-- Downstreamer (downstream@bigfoot.com), December 28, 1999.

Oh well.....Back to the drawing board/HTML textbook.

Its under the General/Awareness category below... : (

-- Downstreamer (downstream@bigfoot.com), December 28, 1999.

That's one big link.

-- Dave (aaa@aaa.com), December 28, 1999.