By Dan Brekke, KQED News Fix
If you live downwind of Chevron’s Richmond refinery, you don’t need to be reminded of what happened there last Aug. 6: A huge fire started in a crude-oil processing unit at the facility, sending an immense plume of thick black smoke over adjacent neighborhoods and much of western Contra Costa County.
In what seems like a miracle, no one in the refinery died when a fireball erupted around the affected processing unit. But the fire sent thousands of local residents to hospitals, mostly with respiratory complaints.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board issued a draft interim report last week detailing its findings on the accident It’s a 68-page document that’s filled with technical descriptions and jargon: The incident occurred from the piping referred to as the “4-sidecut” stream, one of several process streams exiting the C-1100 Crude Unit Atmospheric Column.” Passages like that, replete with references to industry standards and diagrams and charts in the report, might prove impenetrable to many readers.
Read the complete story at KQED News Fix.