Disasters as Normalcy: Chevron's Big Bang

In the Bay Area in California the Chevron refinery is, naturally, in the poor part of the county. The nearest your average middle-class person gets to Richmond is on Highway 580 or Interstate 80, rolling up towards Sacramento or Marin County. East across the Bay from the sad bulk of San Quentin prison, the town of Richmond has a population of around 100,000 whose grandfathers and grandmothers were mustered from the southern states back in World War II to work in the Kaiser shipyards. These days the shipyards are long gone. Unemployment is sky high. There are all the usual scars: drugs, people with nowhere to live, hunger.

The Chevron refinery sits on the end of Richmond, several hundred acres of tanks and pipe. You can see it from almost any front porch in town, The smell is always there, a chemical stink that's so thick that people say it sits like a lifetime weight on their chests. Breathing problems are a curse found in almost every family, most particularly among the very young and the old. All in all, Richmond offers as stark a parable of environmental injustice as you can find anywhere in America. And of course, the town is no stranger to the ratcheting up of "normalcy"--stink, grit, industrial filth, clogged lungs--to the official status of "accident." Since 1989 there have been 29 serious "incidents" at refineries in Contra Costa County. A few weeks before the Chevron blast, a fire at the Tosco Refinery in Martinez, 25 miles to the east of Richmond, killed four workers.

The explosion came on March 25. At 2:28 PM in the afternoon there was huge bang. People closest to the Chevron refinery later described it as sounding as though a Mack truck had crashed into their house, which is indeed what some of them thought had happened. A column of thick, acrid, foul-smelling smoke rose high in the air, cloaked the refinery and then began to drift slowly to the southeast. Workers from the Santa Fe Railroad, whose site borders the refinery, described how instant waves of nausea brought them to their knees, retching and gasping for breath.

The blast came exactly at the moment kids in the area were being let out of school. Teachers rushed them back in, but already many of them were sick and terrified. Eight miles from the Chevron refinery is Spectrum School, a school for seriously disabled children, whose back fence separates it from the Unocal refinery. Richmond's parents say caustically that it's no accident they should have such a school. Many babies in the county are born with serious impairments. One mother said her daughter, who goes to Spectrum, had the familiar range of reactions after the explosion: diarrhea and nausea, compounded with the terror and disorientation of an autistic child.

By six o'clock that Thursday evening, radio stations were reporting Chevron's statement that a pipe had burst and fuel had ignited; that there was no perils from the cloud that by now had drifted down across Berkeley. >From mid-afternoon, roads south like 880, were heavily clogged. There were no buses or BART trains running. The emergency warning system, set up in 1995 after wearisome negotiations with the refineries, did not work well.

Around Doctor's Hospital and Kaiser Richmond, tents were put up in parking lots to shelter the flood of frightened and vomiting residents. There were throngs of crying children and teary-eyed coughing adults often doubled over. Up and down the corridors people complained loudly about the lack of warning and lack of treatment. Staffers at these hospitals weren't so friendly either, often saying flat out, "these people are malingerers."

Sickness was not something that passed within a few hours of the black plume. Four days later, people were still sick, and inhalers were being freely passed out by the hospitals. People were still retching, red-eyed and teary.

The fire was put out early Sunday morning. By Monday there were unconfirmed rumors swirling around Richmond that Chevron was handing out cash to people in exchange for a written promise not to file a lawsuit, and that Chevron was threatening contract workers that if they became party to any suit, they would never work in the refinery again. When it comes to jobs, Chevron is one of the very few games in town. On March 30 Michael Meadows, an attorney based in Contra Costa County, filed suit on behalf of Richmond residents. The case could go on for years. "Normalcy"--in other words, high rates of disease, unemployment, poverty, and crime--will continue in Richmond.

But there are also hopeful signs. Across the years there's been some dedicated organizing. In this context the key grassroots outfit is Communities For a Better Environment, whose Henry Clark and Cynthia Jordan, among others, have established such imaginative strategies as "bucket brigades" where the locals regularly capture samples of air quality in plastic bags which are then sent to a lab for analysis. Upcoming is a blending of several issues. North Richmond's Neighborhood House and local churches are planning town meetings to educate and agitate on the issue of the refineries and also on a suit against the CIA launched by Oakland attorneys William Simpich and Katya Komisaruk on the issue of the CIA's complicity in the import and sale of crack cocaine into Richmond and other west coast communities in the 1980s.

And, oh yes, within hours of the bang, gas prices in the Bay Area began to climb.