One morning in February 2015, I felt a rumble. Was it an earthquake? No. It was an explosion at the ExxonMobil oil refinery a few miles away. The refinery is located in the middle of a residential area of Torrance, Calif.
One morning in February 2015, I felt a rumble. Was it an earthquake? No. It was an explosion at the ExxonMobil oil refinery a few miles away. The refinery is located in the middle of a residential area of Torrance, Calif.
The explosion was scary enough. But even scarier, as we residents found out later, was that it was a near catastrophe. It sent a 40-ton piece of equipment flying and landing only three feet from a tank storing modified hydrofluoric acid (MHF), a deadly chemical that can eat right through bones. If the MHF had been released, it would have created a toxic cloud that could have drifted 15 miles from the refinery, sickening and killing hundreds of thousands of people in Los Angeles County.
Yet many of the news stories at the time focused on the explosion causing gasoline prices to soar because the refinery had to be shut down for 15 months. ExxonMobil officials insisted residents were never in danger.
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