The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board has fined Phillips 66 $285,000 for a 2019 discharge of more than 5 million gallons of partially treated wastewater from its Rodeo refinery to San Pablo Bay.
The Feb. 14, 2019 discharge exceeded the “suspended solids” volume allowed under Phillips’ permits. Suspended solids from petroleum refineries may contain toxic byproducts of refinery operations that can harm aquatic life. No such harm has been observed in San Pablo Bay after the discharge, water quality officials said.
Phillips will pay $142,500 to the State Water Pollution Cleanup and Abatement Account and another $142,500 toward a supplemental environmental project to study how sediment moves through San Francisco Bay.
Thomas Mumley, assistant executive officer for the San Francisco Bay water board, said the settlement is intended both to send a message that all petroleum refineries in the Bay Area need to manage their treatment systems properly, and to deter Phillips specifically from committing similar violations in the future.
Water quality officials said that Phillips could not store enough wastewater from a series of large rainstorms to be treated later, forcing the refinery to bypass the part of its treatment system that filters out suspended solids.
The discharge might not have happened, the San Francisco Bay water board said, had Phillips restored an onsite storage tank to service ahead of those storms. The refinery didn’t return the storage tank in question to service until January 2020.
Phillips spokesperson Adrienne Ursino said the offending discharge was limited to one day, and that all other test results of the discharge water were “well within permit limits for all other constituents and characteristics.”
“Phillips 66 places the utmost importance on environmental protection and the safety of our employees, contractors, and the community, and we continue to make improvements to our refinery infrastructure and operations to manage adverse weather events,” Usino said in an email.
Phillips 66 announced plans to turn its Rodeo refinery, which opened in 1896, into the “world’s largest renewable fuels plant,” producing fuels from cooking oils, fats, greases and soybean oils. It hopes that conversion is finished some time in 2024.
$142,500 is nothing.
Cool. Then you will have no problem giving me $142,500?
On August 14th a PG&E Rolling Power Outage
triggered a 50,000 gallon raw sewage spill into
the Oakland Estuary. It happened at the East Bay
Municipal Utility District’s wastewater treatment
plant in West Oakland. You would hope that
they could prioritize facilities like this when
the decision is made to shut down power.
Who will end up paying the fine for spilling
50,000 gallons of raw sewage?
The taxpayer, I would guess.
Government gets the money, we get the cancer
Agencies that incur fines from the Regional Water Quality Control Board are usually able to negotiate fines down to a fraction of the original amount. Spills also require reports to The Environmental Protection Agency, and Dep’t of Fish And Game.
A government agency, the West Oakland
wastewater treatment facility spills 50,000
gallons of raw sewage into the Oakland
Estuary. Thomas Mumley a government
official of the San Francisco Bay water
board said the settlement with Phillips is
intended to both send a message that all
petroleum refineries in the Bay Area
need to manage their treatment systems
properly, and to deter Phillips specifically
from committing similar violations in the
future. How about cleaning up your own
backyard Mr. Mumley and seeing that all
government sewage treatment systems
are also sent a message to be managed
properly and deter them from committing
similar violations in the future.
#1 My old boss made that fine money in his annual salary, it’s a laughable fine!
#2 I would have thought a company that treats raw sewage would and should have a power outage plan. I know PG&E is crap, but as a company that treats hazardous materials, shouldn’t you have a disaster recovery plan for this sort of thing? I mean we can’t blame PG&E when the next earthquake hits, and crap is pouring into the bay. What’s the difference?
I’m just tried of the finger pointing, stop the blame game. And more money was spent in total court fees and paperwork than that fine!