As the March 3 election nears, some anti-oil activists in Hermosa Beach have distilled the argument against drilling to a set of images. One shows a perfect blue wave. Another shows a dirty brown wave, presumably made so by an oil spill.
The environmental sins of the oil industry are well documented, from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska to the massive damage wrought by a faulty BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Hovering over the industry is also the knowledge that non-renewable, combustible fuels are a leading cause of climate change.
The arguments for and against oil drilling in Hermosa Beach are about many things, including money, health, and the community’s sense of identity. But the success or failure of Measure O hinges perhaps most fundamentally on its real or perceived environmental risks.
Those risks are detailed in the 1,133 page Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR), prepared for the city by Marine Research Services. The analysis was required by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a 45-year old law that goes beyond federal safeguards and calls for state and local agencies to study the impacts of proposed projects and adopt measures to mitigate such impacts where possible.
“The E & B Oil Drilling & Production FINAL Environmental Impact Report” is a broad ranging document that contemplates everything from the historical value of the brick and mortar furnace in the city maintenance building, to the possibility of finding human remains at the drill site, to the likelihood of a pipeline rupture and and how much rain it would take for oil from such an accident to reach the ocean (and the chances that much rain — a half inch — would fall on the same day).
This last item is something the FEIR focused on particularly — that is, what it would take to have an accident that could foul the marine environment a third of a mile from the drill site at 555 Sixth Street. The risk of a spill at the site itself was found to be so minimal as to be insignificant. According to the FEIR consultants, the factors that would need to align to breach the site’s containment berms, would be a “very large earthquake” and a half inch of rain, calculated as a one in 100 million chance.
But the four miles of pipelines that would run underground along Valley Drive and finally along 190th Street to the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance present a greater risk, according the the FEIR. The report finds nine areas of “significant unavoidable impacts,” including aesthetics, air quality, biology, hydrology, land use, noise, recreation, and safety and risk of upset. Three of those areas specifically contemplate an oil spill from the pipelines, which an appendix to the FEIR calculates has a 34 percent chance of happening over the lifetime of the project, a risk diminished to 12 percent with required mitigation.
It’s a number that has become central to the environmental arguments against oil drilling in Hermosa Beach. At an environmental impacts forum hosted by Councilwoman Nanette Barragan and anti-oil activists at the Hermosa Beach Community Center in late January, famed environmental lawyer and activist Robert Kennedy Jr. seized onto this calculation.
“If you were going to take a trip to LA and you knew there was a 12 percent chance you’d get in an accident that day, would you go?” Kennedy asked an audience of a few hundred people. “What if you went to a restaurant and you knew there was a 12 percent chance you’d get food poisoning — would you eat that meal?”
“This is not an industrial community,” Kennedy said. “I grew up in an industrial community on the Hudson [River Valley]. You don’t want to turn Hermosa Beach into Hoboken. So those don’t strike me as good chances.”
E & B Natural Resources vice president Michael Finch says the use of the 12 percent risk calculation is an example of how FEIR findings are frequently distorted for political purposes. This calculation is for a drop of oil spilling anywhere outside the pipeline anytime during the 35 year life of the project, and Finch said that this risk was not itself deemed significant in the FEIR.
“What they looked at is if [the oil] made its way to the ocean, and that is where the number gets very, very small,” Finch said, noting the larger risk calculation for a combination of any spill with a half inch “rain event” was calculated as once in 220,000 years, or .016 percent over the lifetime of the project. Finch also said a newer technology proposed by E & B called “pipe in pipe” further narrows the probability of a rupture to 1 in 1,114,121 years, or .0003 percent during the lifetime of the project, according to calculations made by MRS.
Finch said a lot of environmentally desirable projects run aground in California due to the CEQA process. The statewide high speed rail project has faced CEQA challenges and a proposed $5 billion Tesla electric car battery “gigafactory” left the state, even after CEQA exemptions were offered.
“Here, what it comes down to is any project, like high speed rail or a desal plant, is stalled by the CEQA process,” Finch said. “How difficult it is stops a lot of projects. The reason it happens is if you are an opponent of a project, CEQA is a great tool to have. It becomes a PR document, but what it’s supposed to be is a disclosure document.”
“They’ll say nine significant unavoidable impacts, and once you tell somebody that, it’s like, ‘Wow, that sounds like a lot.’ There is no frame of reference for what that means,” Finch said.
That the FEIR is not well understood is something even some anti-oil activists agree upon. But they argue that the document can also be used to assuage environmental concerns with assurances that problems will be mitigated — which is taken as a fait accomplis by the FEIR but depends upon the project applicant’s implementation.
Stop Hermosa Beach Oil activist Phil Freidl, a local real estate professional with an engineering background, said the city has leaned on the CEQA process perhaps too much insofar as some officials have suggested that it ensures the safety of the proposed project.
“That fundamentally is not what the CEQA process is meant to do,” he said. “It does not ensure the project is safe. The operator ensures that the project is safe. That is something fundamental that people need to understand….The mitigation measures are only as good as the company putting them in place. And that is a major concern with E & B.”
Significant impacts
The CEQA review process looks at 18 environmental resource areas, analyzes impacts, and provides both mitigation for those impacts and environmentally superior alternatives to the project. Among its alternatives, like most FEIRs, was a “no project” alternative, as well as a project of shorter duration and fewer wells, and the use of the nearby AES Redondo power plant site for oil drilling.
The analysis of the E & B project proposes more than 130 mitigation measures, relegating some concerns to less than significant, but concludes that nine impacts could not be mitigated beyond the point of significance.
The aesthetic impact the FEIR examines has largely to do with the equipment required to drill for oil — an 87-foot electric drill rig covered by a three-sided acoustical shield that would be used for four months for the initial test drilling in the project’s “Phase 2”, or second year, and for 30 months during the project’s “Phase 4”, or fourth, fifth, and sixth years; and about 30 days a year for the remainder of project’s 35 years. Also, a 110-foot “workover” rig could be used up to 90 days a year during Phase 4. Mitigation includes a requirement that the shield is a “neutral sky color” made of non-reflective materials in addition to a permanent 32-foot wall surrounding the facility. But the report concludes that the rigs would still impact the neighborhood.
“Night views of the open (illuminated) side of the drill rig, with the pattern and scale of this illuminated feature, would be out of character with existing nighttime views,” the FEIR reads. “Similar to daytime impacts, this vertical feature would project above the horizontal plane of the existing illuminated environment and would become a focal element. The duration of exposure, number of sensitive viewers, and nature of the visual change would result in impacts that would be significant.”
Air quality impacts are concerned mostly with odors. The FEIR notes that the Sixth Street facility would be within 100 feet of businesses, 160 feet of residences, 55 feet of the Greenbelt and 20 feet of public sidewalks. Small pump leaks and drilling processes such as “muds handling” could cause short-term, intermittent odors. Note is also made of toxic emissions from diesel-powered equipment, such as the workover rigs, but none exceed existing air quality thresholds. Mitigation includes odor-masking materials and an air monitoring plan that would transmit immediate data to the city, and means for residents to report odors.
“The unavoidable impact threshold for odor is two parts per billion. We can’t meet that threshold, but no business can,” Finch said.
Noise impacts considered significant and unavoidable in the FEIR are those generated during demolition of the existing maintenance yard and construction of both the drilling facility and the new maintenance yard, located near City Hall. The biggest increase is from a preexisting 52 decibels to 62 decibels during construction in the residences just west of the site on Loma Drive. (By way of reference, rainfall usually falls at about 50 decibels, while a small sewing machine registers 60 decibels). All drilling noise is brought below significant increase levels through mitigation measures, which include sound insulation barriers and a “super quiet mode” that essentially turns the drills off between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. each night.
“Opponents cite ‘noise impact during construction,’ but don’t explain that our project’s noise threshold is 36 decibels,” Finch said. “The average ambient decibel level is 46. A whisper at three feet is 30 decibels. Waves at night are 40 decibels. Conversation is 60 decibels.”
Freidl believes the FEIR did not adequately consider ground borne vibrations and further argued quantitative measures of sound miss a key qualitative point.
“It really goes to a very subtle kind of thing — you can’t put a decibel number on what is really annoying or impactful to people in their homes,” he said. “I think that is a big concern and the EIR didn’t address the fact that right now our ambient noise is the waves. That’s a very different ambient noise than hearing the humming of a drill rig or the clanging of pipes swinging in the air.”
He added that noise and odors are quality of life issues that are hard to quantify in any study.
“We have a period of years of construction that has its own set of unavoidable impacts, but the ones that are really of concern — we are going to see workover rigs and redrilling throughout the life of this project,” Freidl said. “Every time they do that, we’ve got odor issues, we’ve got noise issues, and we’ve got light issues that come back to us time and time again. I think that is something the oil company has really been trying to sweep under the rug.”
The FEIR addresses such concerns by citing the significant unavoidable impacts related to a change in land use. “The drilling, construction, and potential future operations would be in close proximity to land uses zoned as open space (parks, baseball fields and the Greenbelt) and residential,” the report says. “Proposed Oil Project activities during all phases may generate significant noise, odor and visual impacts that would be incompatible with these adjacent land uses.”
This “significant unavoidable impact,” to Freidl, best encompasses what the E & B oil project will mean to Hermosa Beach.
“One of the things the oil company claims is that this is an industrial area, [which] the city has zoned light manufacturing,” he said. “We are talking light manufacturing — surfboard shops, auto body shops, recording studios, T-shirt shops. We are not talking recycling lead batteries; they are not manufacturing steel down there….Its surrounding uses are parks, the Greenbelt, homes close to small businesses. One guy has a recording studio and teaches kids guitar and his wall is adjacent to the site.”
“[Oil drilling] is just really incompatible for the character and previous uses of that site.”
The compatibility issue was emphasized at the environmental impacts forum hosted by Barragan and anti-oil activists. One of the featured speakers was Philip Kingston, a councilman from Dallas, Texas. In 2013, he spearheaded a movement that resulted in one of the strictest laws in the nation separating oil and gas production facilities from neighborhoods and other uses. The law requires a 1,500 ft. setback.
Kingston summed up the impetus for the law in uniquely Texan manner: “I like hog fat, and I like batteries,” he said. “But I don’t want either one of them made behind my house.”
“The reason for setbacks is what happens when something goes wrong at a drill site,” he said. “When things go wrong, they explode, and things can fly a long ways. A hundred feet is not enough…You don’t want to be anywhere near this stuff.”
Finch argued opponents don’t really understand what a small, modern drill site looks, sounds, or smells like, nor how it utilizes new technology. The FEIR notes that 400 oil and gas production sites are currently in operation in LA County; 26 of those are operated by E & B, Finch said, and none utilize the most up-to-date technology as comprehensively as what is proposed in Hermosa Beach.
“You look at new directional drilling — this is an exactly appropriate application,” he said. “[Other sites] are closer to residential than this project, which has a buffer. Look at the LA Basin — it has a lot of oil sites, because we can go back in and tap the resource and we do it in very small, tight places. I see this as a perfect application for this project.”
Thresholds, failures, and risks
The four other environmental areas the FEIR found had significant unavoidable impacts are hydrology, biology, recreation, and a broad category called safety and risk of upset. All four are directly related to oil spills or so-called “blowouts,” the uncontrolled releases of oil or gas that can occur when drilling encounters highly pressurized pockets that in the heyday of oil exploration were more gleefully known as “gushers.” The likelihood for a spill or a blowout is minimal, according to the report, but if they occur would impact water, wildlife, and recreation.
The section of the report that examines safety and risk of upset dwells extensively on failure. One table notes that a failure to follow instructions occurs once every 18 times it is done; failure to read a 10 digit number correctly occurs once every 167 times it is read; a switch fails to operate once every 3,333 times it is used; a welded connection leaks once every 1,142 years per weld; a computer fails to run once every 10.5 months; and a propane tank explodes once every 10 million years per tank.
The probability of a blowout or spill is low. According to the FEIR, blowout rates are between .33 to 5.2 blowouts per 1,000 wells drilled. Industry data cited in the report indicate that among the 250,000 wells drilled between 1990 and 2006 in the U.S., 373 blowouts occurred; the largest offshore oil spill in history, the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, was the result of a blowout .
The Torrance Oil Field, which the E & B project proposes to tap, was drilled from a Redondo Beach site in the1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Though tapping into a different portion of the oil field, historical data indicates some of the Redondo wells had pressures between 1,000 and 2,000 psi.
“Although it is not known at this time what areas, or if any areas, of the drilling will encounter pressure that could produce a blowout, historical data from drilling in Redondo Beach indicates that there is the potential for some of the wells to produce pressure and the potential for a blowout,” the FEIR states, noting that E & B has proposed blowout prevention equipment (BOPE) that would lessen this risk. “However, blowout scenarios can still occur due to the potential for a pressurized reservoir and the potential for BOPE failures, and these are difficult to mitigate and would be significant during drilling.”
The FEIR notes that mitigation measures would reduce the risk of pipeline ruptures to a less than significant level. But the report still contemplates pipeline spills in its findings of unavoidable and significant impacts for biology, hydrology, and recreation.
Finch said the problem with the FEIR is that it uses a threshold of significance that is impossible to meet. The MRS consultants determined the thresholds for significance based on those used most commonly by other relevant agencies. In the case of spills, for example, the consultants directly referenced those used by the State Lands Commission and Santa Barbara County, which has long history of oil exploitation. In a letter to the city last October, the consultants described this as “essentially a zero threshold for spills into the marine environment.”
Finch argues this is nonsensical.
“This would never happen, but let’s assume for a minute you bought a new car, but before you could use it you had to put the car through an EIR,” Finch said. “It would fail this threshold. You would park, oil might drip from it, and during a rain enter a storm drain and out into the ocean. That is the same threshold we are talking about here.”
“Say someone drops a gallon of gasoline at a gas station on Sepulveda, and it was raining, and it goes to the ocean. Is that a significant impact? If the answer is yes, it seems the process has gotten cheapened.”
Finch said that the pipelines the standard applies to in Santa Barbara are mostly in the ocean. The FEIR, he said, failed to make any such distinction in its contemplation of thresholds.
“They used the language, ‘This is low probability this will happen, but if it does happen it could be significant.’ Well, wait a minute — if it does happen, we are not talking devastating the entire Santa Monica Bay. I mean, oil spills are not good, but at the end of the day they can be cleaned up….We are talking a small, finite amount of oil and it’s very manageable to clean it up. The idea that it enters the Santa Monica Bay is just complete hogwash.”
Freidl says the small chance of an oil spill is well understood, but that does not make any spill acceptable in a community such as Hermosa Beach.
“It may be a low probability, but the impact would be very, very high,” he said. “There is a low probability of an accident happening, but if an accident does happen, the impacts would be far reaching, especially a blowout or any kind of accident or explosion like we just saw in Torrance [at the ExxonMobil refinery]. It would have devastating impacts. That is the main concern, to me — we are subject to human error, and how do you really put a probability on human error? You can look at history and come up with statistical probability….But say you are going to have surgery, and you don’t feel comfortable with your doctor — that’s going to give you pause. To me, that is what we are dealing with here.”
The problem, Freidl says, is E & B. He points to a history of spills, including in Santa Barbara and Kern counties. “Even in Hermosa Beach, a simple boring they had to take on the site they didn’t get a permit for,” he said. “So there are just a lot of issues. It’s a highly unusual project in terms of the amount of equipment they are packing on a 1.3 acre site.”
“We are placing a lot of trust in a company that has no demonstrated record of having done this safely, without significant incidents.”
Finch acknowledged that E & B has had spills at other sites, but notes that the company reported the spills and no significant damage occurred. Further, he said most incidents had to do with facilities built in the 1950s and 1960s, very unlike the newer, safer technology that would be deployed in Hermosa.
“Every single one of those were cleaned up and no ongoing issues related to the spills occurred,” he said. “And we self-reported those spills — that is the sign of a good partner, someone who is reporting and doing the right thing. I would be very leery of any company that said we did not have an incident.”
Finch further argued in the bigger picture, both in terms of safety and environmental protection, local production is a superior way obtaining oil.
“California consumes 1.8 million gallons of oil a day. We produce 600,000 barrels a day. So, every day we import 1.2 million barrels,” Finch said. “If we are truly concerned about the environment, we should produce the oil we consume because we have safety standards in place that they don’t have in Africa, Venezuela and the Middle East.”
