Daniel Borenstein: Air district's Richmond refinery fire statement incomplete, inaccurate

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_21287888/daniel-borenstein-air-districts-richmond-refinery-fire-statement

As hundreds of Richmond residents complained of respiratory ailments after Monday night's fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District sent out a news release suggesting everything was fine.

For area residents who put up with daily pollution from the refinery and the anxiety and health effects resulting from Monday's fire, the statement added insult to injury. Coming from an agency that is supposed to protect the public, it was particularly disturbing. Following a night of television coverage of thick black smoke spewing from the refinery, it also defied common sense.

It turns out that none of those test results measured smoke particulates in the air, which could very well have been the cause of respiratory problems, including asthma attacks, that residents reported experiencing.

That didn't become clear until Bay Area News Group reporter Sandy Kleffman talked to Contra Costa's public health director, Dr. Wendel Brunner, on Wednesday. He was the first public official to emphasize the shortcomings of the air district's data. The district will eventually report particulate levels from the fire, but the usefulness of the findings will be questionable. Here's why:

The agency regularly measures for particulates at just six locations around the Bay Area, one of which is in San Pablo, about three miles from the refinery. The samples are only collected for a 24-hour period once every six days.

In this case, the scheduled period happened to begin at midnight Monday, roughly six hours after the fire broke out and about an hour after shelter-in-place orders to residents had been lifted.

Eric Stevenson, a chemical engineer responsible for air district testing, told me the results from that sampling, which are still being analyzed, will be useful because particulates from the fire were probably still in the air long after it was contained.

But, when pressed, he acknowledged that it's unknown whether the particulate fallout might have peaked before the test began or whether the lone location happened to be in the path of the smoke plume.

As for the test results reported Tuesday, those air samples were collected at downwind locations where air district officials believed they might see environmental effects. Unlike the particulate test, these tests measured gaseous pollutants.

The news release touted that the samples were tested for 23 compounds, and none exceeded state standards. It turns out that's not so. A sample taken at the top of the El Cerrito hills had excessive levels of Acrolein, which is also a respiratory irritant.

Dr. Paul Blanc, chief of the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at UC San Francisco, deserves credit for first noticing the district's Acrolein test result. "These are at a level that could potentially raise concern," he told me.