Twenty-five Years Ago the Port Said It Won’t Fund Domes for Coke

Twenty-five years ago this week, the Port of Los Angeles shot down Councilman Rudy Svorinich’s idea of financing the petroleum coke domes at the Los Angeles Export Terminal, explaining that the company couldn’t afford to repay the money. 

Random Lengths News reporter Arthur R. Vinsel described the particulate-producing behemoth as:

A complex of pipes and pits, towers, rails, and roadways resembling a 21st-century amusement park, covering 113 acres of manmade pier dredged from [the] harbor… 

Two massive storage domes at the Port of Los Angeles, each large enough to cover a football field, were built to cover piles of petroleum coke, a refinery byproduct that the government has labeled as a cancer-causing material and is used instead of coal to fire electric generation plants overseas. The domes were comically referred to as the “bra of the POLA”. 

A strange side note to this story is that the grand-nephew of the Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel was LAXT’s vice president and general manager, Lou Rommel. He was in charge of constructing the LAXT, which was made with large steel pipes that were prominently labeled with the German steel manufacturer Krupp. 

LAXT had opened in 1997 and looked to expand operations to feed the appetite for petroleum coke in Asia, at a time when Los Angeles County ranked last in air quality in the nation with Harbor Area residents suffering higher rates of early cardiopulmonary disease and related deaths.

Concerned residents neighboring the facility formed the Safe Air Coalition to oppose the facility and were joined by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Building Trades Council who took issue with the plant owners attempting to use non-union labor to build and operate the terminal, forced LAXT to back down. RLnews covered this in an editorial campaign that lasted 18 months and alerted the South Coast Air Quality District to the pollution.

Despite being white when they were erected, an unaccounted-for phenomenon resulted in the coke dust turning the domes almost black. The plastic material on the outside would develop a static charge, attracting the fine dust particles. The sun would heat the plastic and make it soft enough for the dust to stick to the surface, where it bonded like paint. After numerous efforts to remove the dust from the surface of the two structures proved fruitless, further cleaning efforts were abandoned. The slowly darkening domes became a symbol to air quality activists and neighbors who railed against port pollution.

Eight years after the domes were erected, the Los Angeles harbor commissioners voted to demolish the 12-story concrete domes. 

After the domes and coke piles were cleared, the land was developed as a liquid bulk facility.

I decided to recall this history,  as a reminder that, “Power,” as the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously said, “ Concedes nothing without a demand. It never did. And it never will.”   

This history should serve as a reminder of what progress has been made in improving air quality in the Los Angeles Harbor, it happened because everyday people tired of choking on the exhaust of progress and profit banded together and fought, from the picket line and the court of public opinion; from the negotiating rooms to the courtrooms. 

San Pedro’s neighborhood councils would do well to recall and remember this history as the Port of Los Angeles rolls out its LA Waterfront Connectivity plan and complies with the Clean Air Action Plan as it rolls out zero-emission port vehicles.