Environment & Energy

...this goes back 50 years ago, that a suburban/urban area could be an oil field. One would see operating oil pumps in the parking lots of strip malls. I was in my early 20s, a bit of a rube, and I certainly didn't understand the finer points of all the refineries nearby.

I was also shocked to see, about three months after moving to the LA basin, that after a rain brought down all the air pollutants, that the basin was actually surrounded by mountains that were visible from anywhere in the basin in the absence of air pollution.

Later I came to understand that every refinery, notably the ExxonMobil refinery that sat right on the Crenshaw fault, was a Bhopal waiting to happen because of the HF tanks holding the hydrofluoric acid being used as a cracking catalyst. (As it is there was a near miss of that tank being breached after an explosion there, but it wasn't widely publicized because it didn't involve a nuclear plant.)

When I moved to Hermosa Beach I sometimes had to bicycle past that refinery on my way to work, and was always scared shitless once I understood that tank was there.

I've worked with some pretty dangerous chemicals in my career, even some that had a history of being used as chemical warfare agents in the so called "Great War." I regard HF as the scariest. There it was, a tank containing hundreds of kilos, if not tons, of that liquefied gas, right across the street from suburban houses.

Petroleum dependence sucks.