Refinery Town Read online

  Chevron’s oil-drilling misbehavior in the Santa Barbara Channel resulted in an $8 million fine and pleas of guilty to criminal and civil charges in 1992. A year later it was time to plead no contest and pay a $550,000 fine for an oil spill off El Segundo. Four years after that, safety violations on its offshore drilling platform near Ventura cost the company $1.1 million to settle. In 2000, back in El Segundo, offshore loading operations in violation of the Clean Air Act were settled for $7 million. Oh, and then there was the 2001 settlement of a lawsuit over groundwater contamination in California and nineteen other states. That one cost Chevron and its competitors $422 million. Chevron refineries in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey had a rap sheet similar to the company’s California facilities.38

  The 2012 accident investigation conducted by the US Chemical Safety Board revealed that Chevron engineers in Richmond had recommended repair work on the corroded pipe at fault—more than a decade earlier. When the pipe burst after being prodded, the resulting vapor cloud reached an ignition source almost immediately, creating a huge fireball followed by a thousand-foot column of toxic smoke and gas. “This was a near-miss that was totally preventable,” said Ron Espinoza, an official of the United Steel Workers, which now represents Richmond refinery workers after absorbing the OCAW in 2005. “It was also inevitable, given the way these companies are running the refineries. They haven’t been doing preventive maintenance, and it’s getting more and more dangerous.”39

  I asked one refinery safety expert, who came to Richmond with the US Chemical Safety Board, why Chevron deferred needed maintenance work for so long. He believed the same type of accident could have occurred at any number of other refineries locally or nationally. “The culture of the industry is very cowboy, very macho,” he explained. “The oil industry is arrogant, insular, and doesn’t learn from other sectors. Upper management and even the safety professionals in an oil refinery are very production-oriented and know the least about refinery safety.” Mike Smith, a Richmond refinery worker now employed by United Steelworkers (USW) Local 5 agrees: “The industry’s record pretty much sums it up. These so-called accidents are not accidents at all. They’re what happens when an industry doesn’t pay attention to safety.”

  The biggest price that Chevron paid for the 2012 fire was its own repair and lost production costs of $5.3 million and $900 million respectively. California’s Division of Occupational Health and Safety (Cal/OSHA) cited the company for eleven “willful” violations and proposed its largest fine ever—nearly $1 million. Chevron pleaded “no contest” to six criminal charges filed by state and local prosecutors and agreed to pay $2 million in fines and restitution. (By one estimate, these financial penalties equaled five minutes’ worth of the company’s total operating revenue at the time.)40 Chevron was also placed on probation for three and a half years. While in that status, the company promised to inspect its piping system for other signs of corrosion, develop new pipe leak and emergency response training materials, and provide periodic reports on its implementation of these and other safety steps.

  Ten months after its safety lapse, Chevron named a new general manager for the Richmond refinery. Chemical engineer and twenty-seven-year company man Kory Judd embarked on a local goodwill tour, which included a stop at the Point Richmond Neighborhood Council. Judd appeared before us with buzz-cut hair, an open-necked blue shirt, trendy leather jacket, and a folksy manner. He had a corporate PR person at his side. “We have to appreciate some of the issues and concerns the city and community have raised,” Judd acknowledged. Since the 2012 accident, the company had “changed the way that we do maintenance and inspections,” he assured us. In addition, Chevron had “changed protocol around responses to leaks” and was about to install new and improved air quality monitoring devices that would further protect the community.

  In response to an audience question about Chevron’s current or future use of crude from Canadian tar sands, transported to Richmond by rail, Judd denied that the company had any plans to unload its raw material from anything but tankers. “We’ve got a nice deepwater wharf,” he explained, referring to the 4,200-foot East Bay landmark in front of our house. According to Judd, Chevron just wanted to “make good products and be a good neighbor.” But, he emphasized, the company could not “add value to the city of Richmond” without making a “reasonable profit.”

  Reasonable or otherwise, Chevron’s estimated Richmond profits were, at the time, about $2 billion a year. With that healthy bottom line in mind, the city council voted in late July 2013 to seek what some activists hoped would be hundreds of millions of dollars in fire-related compensation. Chevron had already reported spending millions to reimburse local hospitals for their emergency care and satisfy some claims filed by twenty-four thousand individuals affected by the fire. However, when the city also tried to negotiate a settlement, covering its claimed losses, the company’s best offer never topped $10 million.

  Even city councilors friendly to Chevron found this to be on the low side. So in a rare unanimous vote the council authorized hiring a high-powered personal injury firm to pursue environmental justice before a judge and jury in Contra Costa County Superior Court. Richmond’s damage suit accused Chevron of “years of neglect, lax oversight, and corporate indifference to necessary safety inspection and repairs” in a facility generating $20 billion in annual revenue and 10 percent of the company’s overall earnings in 2013.

  THE CASE OF ECUADOR

  Unfortunately, if Ecuador’s courtroom battles with Big Oil are any guide, it may be quite a while before Richmond’s case is resolved. Ecuadorans filed their own pesky lawsuit against Chevron in 2003 and it has since become the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of global environmental litigation. The plaintiffs’ claim dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, when Ecuador’s Lago Agrio oil field was being exploited, under a friendly government, by Texaco, a US firm later acquired by Chevron. In the 1990s, Texaco agreed to pay $40 million to clean up the mess it made by dumping toxic waste in the Amazon rain forest. In 1998, the Ecuadoran government agreed that Texaco should be absolved of any further financial responsibility.

  The indigenous people directly affected disagreed and continued to seek further compensation for their damaged flora, fauna, and water sources. Chevron has vigorously contested their class action claim, arguing that it’s not liable for what Texaco did. An Ecuadoran trial court initially granted the Lago Agrio plaintiffs $8.6 billion in damages for their lost crops, farm animals, and oil-related health problems, including increased local cancer rates. On appeal, this award was boosted to $19 billion, a decision then contested by the company before the Ecuadoran National Court of Justice, the country’s highest court, which scaled the damages back to $9.5 billion.

  Meanwhile, the plaintiffs sought to collect their court judgment in other countries where Chevron still operates—such as Brazil, Argentina, and Canada. In September 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld an appellate court ruling in Ontario permitting the Ecuadorans to proceed with their suit to seize Chevron assets in Canada to satisfy the 2011 judgment, as amended. The company’s defense in Canada is likely to track the arguments made in a countersuit filed in the United States under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute, a federal law that has been used against organized crime groups.

  In that case, Chevron claimed that the original verdict in Ecuador was the product of “coercion, bribery, money laundering, and other misconduct.” The federal judge presiding ruled that Steven Donziger, the brave public interest lawyer representing the people of Lago Agrio, used fraudulent and “corrupt means” to win his case. The company’s top lawyer described the court’s sanctioning of Donziger as “vindication of what we have been saying all along”—namely that all the earlier litigation, favoring the plaintiffs, was “a travesty of justice.”

  Chevron planned to use the RICO case ruling, upheld on appeal, to shield itself from further overseas collection efforts, in Canada or anywhere else. In a 2015 intervie
w, Donziger, with little exaggeration, accused Chevron of conducting “the most well-funded corporate retaliation campaign in the history of human rights litigation.” By his estimate, the company “has spent at least $2 billion on 60 law firms, 2,000 lawyers, 200 private investigators, dozens of lobbyists, and at least eight different public-relations firms.”41

  Richmond’s own lawsuit was filed on the first anniversary of the 2012 fire, a day before the biggest refinery-related protest in the city’s history. The rock stars of that event were Mayor McLaughlin, from the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), and Vermont visitor Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, the national environmental group that cosponsored the demonstration with the RPA. In her speech to a crowd of 2,500, McLaughlin demanded that Chevron develop “a new culture of safety” while reducing emissions, saying that “future generations have the right to live and breathe on a planet that’s sustainable.” McKibben looked up at the bright sky over Point Richmond and wryly observed that we were experiencing “a solar spill.” The day will come, he predicted, when all that sun won’t go to waste and Chevron will either be “an energy company that works on the sun and the wind or they will go out of business.”

  As Richmond police arrested two hundred members of the crowd who peacefully blocked the main entrance to Chevron, some protestors passed around copies of an unusual full-page ad in the weekend edition of the Contra Costa Times, Richmond’s newspaper. It was paid for by the Ecuadoran government and expressed solidarity “with the people of Richmond on their day of protest about the disaster and its aftermath.” Said the ad: “In the fight against Chevron, the people of Ecuador and the people of Richmond can deploy the most devastating weapon ever invented . . . the truth.”

  TWO

  THE GREENING OF CITY HALL

  LATE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY RICHMOND mirrored the postindustrial desolation of former manufacturing centers in the Rust Belt. Once prosperous and bustling, the city now suffered from high levels of unemployment, poverty, family disintegration, street crime, and violence. In neighborhoods where residential housing and industrial activity once coexisted, factory owners packed up and fled, just like local retailers did after the downtown disturbances of the 1960s. Left behind were vacant lots and abandoned buildings, brownfields were scattered all over town, each representing a loss of blue-collar jobs.

  More than a dozen former factory sites, often lacking warning signs and protective fencing, were not just eyesores. Due to past chemical manufacturing or storage, they were “toxic hot spots” ending up on the Environmental Protection Agency Superfund cleanup list. On Point Isabel, just south of the former Kaiser shipyard, tens of thousands of old battery casings lay buried beneath a shoreline park, leaching lead and other poisons into a swimming beach and nearby fishing spots.

  In North Richmond, liquid polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from discarded utility company equipment tainted local groundwater, thanks to past dumping by Fass Metals. The processing and shipping of DDT by United Heckathorn left marine sediment in Richmond harbor badly contaminated. Stauffer Chemical, another maker of pesticides and fertilizers, created a residual toxic stew so hard to remediate that its former site remains fenced off, overgrown with weeds, and undeveloped nearly two decades after production ceased there.1 In the Blair Landfill, a shoreline parcel near the Stauffer site, radioactive material was discovered in the soil, a likely legacy of solid uranium being melted for years by Stauffer Metals, a sister company.

  Deindustrialization left human wreckage behind as well. By the early 1980s, Richmond was suffering from a major crack epidemic. Assault rifles replaced handguns as the weapon of choice for drug dealers seeking to expand or simply defend their local market share. Adding to the city’s illegal gun trafficking were three dozen federally licensed firearms dealers who did business from private homes within the city. Homicides increased from ten to twenty per year in the 1960s to an annual death toll of fifty in the 1980s, finally peaking at sixty-two killings in 1991, almost all drug- and gang-related.

  Meanwhile, Richmond’s African American community was decimated from within by the highest rate of AIDs transmission in the Bay Area, through heterosexual sex and drug use. In search of personal security, better housing and schools, or improved job prospects, middle-class blacks joined the trajectory of Richmond’s earlier white flight. People moved their families to safer communities such as Vallejo, Antioch, Fairfield, or even far-off Tracy. Left behind, in disproportionate numbers, were Richmond residents one activist described as “low-income, under-educated, and criminal-justice involved.”

  During this troubled era, Richmond city hall was no beacon of hope. Its deepening dysfunction was due in part to Darrell Reese, a Richmond fire captain and longtime leader of Fire Fighters Local 188. Reese, a shady backroom patron of local African American politicians, “raised plantation politics to an art form,” according to John Gioia, a Richmond native who is now a Contra Costa County supervisor.

  City councilors depended on Reese for campaign funding and endorsements. In return, Richmond’s public safety unions, including Reese’s, got favored city hall treatment at the bargaining table, sometimes to the detriment of other union-represented city workers. Reese was a white Republican who lived in suburban Rodeo. Yet his stock in trade—as a part-time political consultant, fixer, bagman, and lobbyist for developers—was election year appeals to “save the black seats on the council.” Meanwhile, Reese’s own firefighters’ local, like the Richmond Police Officers Association (RPOA), still had few nonwhite members.

  Through his union political action committee, Reese wielded enough influence to pick Richmond city managers. In 1993, he helped install Floyd Johnson, who served four years before being fired for shoddy budgeting, dwindling city reserve funds, and other administrative problems. With backing from Reese, Richmond’s director of employment and training, Isiah Turner, then replaced Johnson, with disastrous consequences. Turner was hired despite an employment history that included a forced resignation in Washington State after an auditor discovered his misuse of $22,000 in public funds. On Turner’s watch, Richmond city finances deteriorated further, to the point of near bankruptcy.

  After budget shortfalls and layoffs in 2003, Turner suddenly retired for “health reasons,” followed out the door by his finance director. Just a few months later, Richmond discovered that it faced a $35 million budget deficit, which the recently departed city manager had managed to conceal. California state auditors accused Turner of “deliberately misrepresenting both the size of the city’s reserves and its annual expenses.”2 The city’s full-blown fiscal meltdown led to two hundred layoffs and budget cuts, which closed libraries, parks, some fire stations, and senior services.

  In many places, such a long-brewing mess, born of cronyism, corruption, and incompetence, would have deepened popular cynicism about city government. In Richmond, instead, an “unlikely group of Greens, Latinos, progressive Democrats, African Americans, and free spirits” formed a “new Richmond political coalition united over ideals rather than power and personalities,” as then city councilor Tom Butt described this favorable development. The group included residents committed to “civil rights, the environment, education, open government, and quality of life issues,” people who wanted to challenge old guard politicians when five city council seats were up for grabs in 2004.

  Spearheading this effort was fifty-three-year-old Juan Reardon, a burly, gray-bearded immigrant from Argentina. Reardon’s youthful involvement in left-wing politics had led to his exile abroad after a mid-1970s military coup in his homeland. In the late 1980s, he immigrated to the United States and got a graduate degree in epidemiology and biostatistics at UC-Berkeley. Reardon first became familiar with local problems while doing data collection during Richmond’s drug-related HIV-AIDs epidemic. He moved to the city in 1999, helped raise funds and equipment for Cuban hospitals, and lobbied to create an official sister-city relationship between Richmond and Regla, a refinery town near Havana. During Ralph Nader’s presid
ential campaign in 2000, Reardon joined the California Green Party and pulled together some of its most active local members.

  Calling themselves the Richmond Alliance for Green Public Power and Environmental Justice, Reardon’s group opposed construction of a municipal power plant next to the Chevron refinery. Proponents claimed that this oil-fueled facility would meet all of the city’s own electricity needs, as well as generate millions in new revenue when the surplus power was sold to customers elsewhere via Pacific Gas & Electric. The project was killed after the Greens turned out surprisingly large crowds to speak and protest against the additional pollution it would create. They urged the city to explore alternative energy solutions instead. Working with existing environmental groups, like the West County Toxics Coalition, their alliance also pushed Richmond to adopt a stronger industrial safety ordinance to reduce the risk of refinery fires and explosions or chemical spills.

  Reardon and his fellow activists launched a yearlong campaign against police harassment of homeless people after the city council banned sleeping and camping in public places. They supported that part of Richmond’s rapidly growing Latino population accused of vagrancy when seeking work on the sidewalk outside our local Home Depot outlet. To give these workers a collective voice, Reardon helped them create the Richmond–El Cerrito Day Laborers Association. Its protest activity led to an unusual ten-point agreement between the association and the Richmond Police Department (RPD). In writing, the RPD agreed to treat day laborers more politely, respect their right to be on public property, and pursue their complaints about wage theft.