EPA, DHS Officials Fail To Answer Public’s Fundamental Questions at Two-Hour Meeting
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
“If this is outreach, I think you are already failing,” Kathleen Woodfield said about 30 minutes into a two-hour meeting with federal regulators at Peck Park on the eve of Sept. 11.
Rep. Henry Waxman convened the meeting to address concerns raised by the Rancho LPG facility. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency both showed up prepared to explain their operations. But the crowd in attendance was overwhelmingly concerned with their shortcomings—and how to overcome them. Which is why Woodfield, vice president of The San Pedro and Peninsula Homeowners Coalition, seemed to speak for the vast majority of those in attendance.
Waxman was not present because the House was in session, voting that day, but District Director Lisa Pinto chaired the meeting, ably keeping it from descending into chaos. However, she lacked Waxman’s legendary personal and institutional authority to put the agency representatives on the spot, as most of those in attendance clearly wanted.
Rep. Janice Hahn’s District Director Lara Larramendi, read a statement.
“These tanks store millions of gallons of dangerous and explosive chemicals, which are just a couple of blocks away from where families live, work, and send their children to school,” the statement read, in part. “Our office continues to believe that relocation of these tanks is only permanent solution to the threat posed by this facility.”
This drew a spontaneous round of applause from the audience—a rare occurrence in a meeting marked by initial distrust and growing frustration. Tellingly, there was no further discussion of relocation — it was off the agenda — except in questions raised by the public.
Mary Westerling, the EPA official who oversaw the Rancho LPG investigation, was on assignment, assisting in another EPA region, so the leading EPA representative was Kathryn Lawrence, chief of the Emergency Prevention and Preparedness Section for EPA District 9. The top representative of the Department of Homeland Security was David Wulf, director of Infrastructure Security Compliance.
“Fostering security at high-risk chemical facilities, and thereby reducing the risk of successful terrorist attacks, or other terrorist activities that impact communities like San Pedro, is the focus of the program we manage, the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorist Standards program, or CFATS,” said Wulf in his introductory remarks.
The CFATS program as described in the meeting — and supported by documentation on the Department of Homeland Security website — seems to be a broadly comprehensive response to potential terrorists threats in general, with “18 separate risk standards” that have to be met. But what’s missing is any provision for re-assessing the fundamental level of threat that a facility possess to the surrounding community. The implicit operating assumption is that facilities are inherently safe, in and of themselves, except for the addition of a potential terrorist threat — an assumption that’s easily disproven by a long series of deadly headline-grabbing accidents in recent years.
The Department of Homeland Security seemed well-organized and highly focused on reducing risks posed by terrorists, but there is no provision for taking a big picture look at whether a given facility — or combination of closely-related facilities — poses a threat so severe that it simply cannot be reduced to acceptable levels. This is the general concern represented by the specific example of Rancho LPG. Yet, the issue was never clearly addressed at any time in the 2-hour meeting. Still, it bubbled up constantly in comments and questions shouted out or written down.
It also showed up in the very first written question posed at the opening of the question-and-answer period that took up the second half of the meeting:
“How and why does the government turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the fact that this 25 million gallons of high explosive gas sits in 5.5 seismically-built tanks in a rupture zone of a magnitude of 7.3?”
Lawrence responded for the EPA.
“We saw the seismic issues as a concern and that’s why we hired the seismic expert to take a look at this facility,” Lawrence said. “While my background is as a chemical engineer, Mary [Westerling] is a geologist and knows seismic issues, we have an environmental engineer on staff and we have a whole host of other terrific and very well-educated consultants standing behind us when we need them….”
At this point, audience members began to lose patience, as several raised their voices almost simultaneously. “What’s the answer?” the clearest of them shouted out.
“The answer is we evaluated them according to our regulations and they met the standards,” Lawrence replied.
She seemed to miss the fact that she had merely restated the problem, rather than answering it. The crowd, however, was not so easily deceived, but as crowds often do, it lacked a coherent voice, and Pinto responded to the jumble of responses.
“We will make no progress this evening if people shout out,” she said.
The audience still pressed Lawrence for an answer, and she offered more of a narrative about the process.
“We asked a seismic consultant, ‘Do they meet these standards?’” Lawrence said. “And this person said, ‘Yes,’ and it has some recommendations.”
“What standard?” one audience member shouted out
“That is something I’m afraid that I’m not explicitly prepared to say,” Lawrence replied.
There was a distinct ambivalence in the crowd. People wanted their questions answered, and significant questions, like the first one, had already been written down. Yet, as this first non-answer portended — echoing the explanatory monologues that preceded it — simply following the prescribed question-and-answer format seemed doom to failure, if getting real answers to the basic questions of public safety was the goal.
That was exactly how the remainder of the meeting played out, despite a few welcome moments of honesty.
“Some of these questions are bigger than our regulations,” Lawrence acknowledged at one point.
She also admitted that the term “worst-case scenario” was misleading, since it was the scenario involved in the case of Rancho LPG, for example, is very far removed from the worst case —it’s a time-limited release from just one tank, involving no explosion whatsoever.
“We should have used ‘disaster model,” Lawrence said.
Yet, the underlying problem remains unchanged, despite this modest degree of candor. As retired oil industry consultant Connie Rutter has repeatedly explained, LPG facilities are regulated based on standards adopted under threat of a lawsuit from the American Petroleum Institute, which have no basis in physics or chemistry. They are copied from toxic hazard regulations—substances that neither explode, nor rapidly expand via spontaneous evaporation, as liquified petroleum gas does.
“I was only able to yell my refutation that the half-mile blast radius was incorrectly granted after the API suit,” commented Rutter about the lack of candor and honest information involved. “And that the impound basin is ineffective at holding back a butane spill…. I’m not sure how much the attendees were able to grasp…. But, the whole scene, the way it was choreographed, now makes me think that the EPA is now aware it has a problem by caving in to the API, and is trying to keep it quiet…. [T]he EPA is either woefully stupid, or is now in damage control mode.”
“I am very sorry about the outcomes from the meeting,” said nationally famous disaster investigator Bob Bea (aka “the Master of Disaster”), in response to a report of the meeting via homeowner activist Janet Gunter. “It reinforces my current experiences with both U.S. industry and government about reactive risk management: fixing disasters after they happen and relying on ineffective guidelines and regulations to define what is ‘safe’…. Fines are levied that ultimately must be paid by consumers. Some incremental improvements [are made] so all can claim ‘we are safer’ and return to ‘business as usual’ until we have the next major disaster.”
As the meeting ended with litany of unanswered community complaints, Random Lengths sought to translate some of those concerns into a question framework designed to facilitate a responsive reply from Department of Homeland Security. Because we wanted a thoughtful written response, we submitted a three-part question to Wulf via email that evening:
(a) Do you agree that it’s possible some facilities simply can’t be made significantly safer to the same degree that the vast majority of facilities can be?
(b) Do you think that conditions can be clearly identified to qualify facilities as unfixable in this sense?
(c) Do you think that DHS should have the capacity to identify some facilities as inherently too dangerous to fix?
The Department of Homeland Security response—not from Wulf, but from an information officer, was completely unresponsive to the questions posed. Which sums up the underlying government problem in a nutshell.