David visits Goliath
Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke
Last Monday evening I went to a meeting at St. Paul’s Church on 1st Street where Lois Epstein of the Environmental Defense Fund gave us the scoop on Goliath, our Exxon-Mobil neighbor to the east who just put a for-sale sign on his house. If you’re interested, better hurry, but don’t forget to include the $1.9 million in annual property and utility taxes paid to Benicia. Better get prequalified before you make an offer.
Lois’s news, posted at www.edf.org, wasn’t good: Based on EPA’s unaudited numbers, Benicia’s Exxon facility was one of the worst refinery polluters in the nation in 1997.
Ouch. And here I thought they just had weird techno-aesthetic sensibilities: pipes and towers and lights and big boats and pipes and lights and more pipes and more lights. Their electric bill every month of the year has got to be more than Adobe’s bill during the month of December!
But after Lois gave us the bad news, Denny Larson from Communities for a Better Environment told us that all was not lost, that we could take action, that we could control our destiny by collecting and analyzing air samples, by setting up laser-perimeter-fugitive-molecule fence scanners, and by hooking into real-time air-quality monitors.
Okay, I thought. This is good; I’m an American; I master my fate; I can do this.
"How was your day?" I ask my wife at the dinner table.
"Long and tough," she says. "Same old same old. How about yours?"
"I harvested 5 air buckets today," I say with furrowed brow. "The benzene was high, but it was still compliant." My wife’s worried look softens. "But I’m really concerned about the upward trend in 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene and the VOCs - Yep, I’m keeping my eye on those renegade VOCs."
"VOCs?" she says squirming in her chair.
"Volatile organic compounds," I say trying to hide my exasperation. "Honey, you really should take that organic-chemistry-for-poets class at Solano."
Okay, so maybe the creation of a Goliath Air-monitoring Social Club, GASP, is hard to imagine, but then Denny had an even better idea: Create a good-neighbor agreement with Goliath.
That’s the ticket, I thought. Goliath is just plain folks. Like the rest of us he probably has a few skeletons in his closet, but we can talk. If we just get to know one another, everything will be all right.
And wouldn’t you know it, Goliath was holding a theme block party the very next day. The risk-abatement theme didn’t require a costume, so off I went in casual dress armed with my 20 when-did-you-stop-beating-your-spouse questions guaranteed to break the ice at any local refinery gathering.
I was late, and the room was packed. I squeezed into a chair.
Presentations were in progress and there wasn’t any music, so it didn’t really seem as though anyone was having fun. A Goliath family member talked about how they modeled worst-case scenarios that couldn’t possibly happen in a million years while I was thinking about TWA 800, Chernobyl, Egypt Air 990, Three-mile Island and some gigantic off-the-scale earthquake. Someone tried to get Goliath to admit that ammonia could kill while I remembered my grandmother putting ammonia on bee stings. Someone else asked about evacuation plans graphically describing gridlock as all of Benicia fled a blanket of creeping chemicals; I thought of the plot for a novel and subsequent movie rights. But then someone popped one of the 20 questions: "What chemicals do you have on-site that can hurt my family where we live, work, or play?"
Everyone got stiffer. Can you imagine going to your neighbor and asking him to tell you all the bad things about his family that he doesn’t want to tell you? I mean, Goliath’s house is a refinery: He’s got stuff in his medicine cabinet that can curl your toes, strip your skin and embalm you all at the same time.
I was nervous. I don’t remember what Goliath said.
Then someone else asked about Goliath being a terrible polluter, and Goliath said that they have real-time air-quality monitors and that the California Air Resources Board audit of their numbers had measured emissions that were significantly lower than those that had been reported.
It was good news to hear that California audited what EPA couldn’t. Thoughts of resurrecting my old chemistry set faded. I felt much better.
On my way home, I stopped for gas. I filled my tank. Did you know that Goliath has 400 permanent and 200 contract employees who process 130,000 gallons of crude oil each day providing California with 7% of its daily gasoline requirement? That’s pretty impressive for such a quiet, conscientious neighbor.
It wasn’t a great party; everyone seemed a bit on edge; music would have helped; but parties can be like that. Of course, Goliath’s house is for sale, and it’ll be terrible to see them move away. We better make sure the next owners are just as good.
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com