Explosion rocks California Exxon refinery, four injured

The blast at an Exxon Mobil refinery Wednesday morning happened in a recently installed processing facility and the material involved was gasoline, said a Fire Department spokesman.

|
Bob Riha Jr./Reuters
Refinery units are heavily damaged after an explosion at the Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, California, February 18, 2015. An explosion and fire at Exxon Mobil Corp's Torrance refinery sent ash spraying on nearby cars and burst windows of surrounding buildings Wednesday.

An explosion rocked an Exxon Mobil refinery on Wednesday morning, triggering a huge smokestack flare, raining down ash and leaving four with minor injuries, company and local officials said. Workers fled the area.

The facility — a structure several stories tall — was shattered. Crews poured water onto the structure afterward, and a fire spokesman said at midday the situation was controlled.

The blast happened in a recently installed processing facility and the material involved was gasoline, said Fire Department spokesman Steve Deuel.

The facility's flare system was triggered to burn off fuel that could add to the fire, Deuel said.

Residents within a mile or two reported feeling a sharp jolt that they initially thought was an earthquake.

Electrical contractor Cory Milsap-Harris, 21, was in a switch house next door to the blast site keeping an eye on three colleagues working 8 feet underground in a manhole.

"Everything was going smooth. Next thing I hear sounded like heavy metal next door. There was a loud bang," he said. "You could feel the building shake a little."

Milsap-Harris said the blast reverberated in his ears despite the several layers of hearing protection he routinely wears.

He rushed his co-workers outside, where people were running away from flames and black smoke.

Brittney Davis, whose office is about a block from the refinery, says the blast sounded and felt like something had rammed her building.

"The whole building shook. We couldn't figure out what it was, but we stepped outside the door and the flames were shooting up from the refinery," she said.

"I could feel the heat from the flame," she added.

Exxon Mobil spokesman Todd Spitler said the four contractors were taken to a hospital for evaluation. The refinery sent many workers home for the day.

Spitler said the cause of the explosion was under investigation and company officials were working with local agencies. Nearby roads were closed after the blast hit, shortly before 9 a.m., Torrance police Sgt. Paul Kranke said.

Students at 13 nearby schools were kept indoors, said Tammy Khan of the Torrance Unified School District.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District issued a smoke advisory for areas surrounding the refinery.Exxon Mobil said no harmful emissions were detected by its air quality monitors on the refinery fence line.

The facility about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles covers 750 acres, employs over a thousand people, and processes an average of 155,000 barrels of crude oil per day and produces 1.8 billion gallons of gasoline per year, according to the company.

---

Associated Press writers John Antczak, Christopher Weber and Alicia Chang in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Explosion rocks California Exxon refinery, four injured
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Latest-News-Wires/2015/0218/Explosion-rocks-California-Exxon-refinery-four-injured
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe