Fire Chief Jim Lydon delivered a preliminary report on the May 5 Valero Refinery incident at Thursday’s City Council meeting which prompted additional questions by residents.

On the morning of the incident, Valero’s Benicia refinery experienced a power outage as Pacific Gas & Electric was doing maintenance on power lines. The outage resulted in black smoke being released from the refinery, which prompted an evacuation of the Industrial Park for several hours.

Lydon delivered a detailed summary of the incident. He said that the initial city notification came from on-site emergency personnel at the refinery around 6:45 a.m. with an additional call from the manager at approximately 6:50 a.m. The duty chief had observed the flaring operations from Rose Drive.

“His indication was that it appeared to be consistent with previous occurrences of flaring at the refinery,” Lydon said. “He made that judgment based on something we’ve done before.”

Lydon noted that since January 2016, the Fire Department had been notified at least five times over previous flaring operations. However, by 7:30 a.m., it became apparent that the operation was not normal, based on the smoke-related emissions and continued disruption of the refinery operations. The on-site personnel made another call, this time with the recommendation to evacuate the Industrial Park. Police and fire personnel were deployed to the area, entrances to the Industrial Park were shut down, staff attempted to notify businesses in the main corridor of the evacuation by going door to door and the two schools closest to the refinery— Robert Semple and Matthew Turner elementary schools— established shelters-in-place. Additionally, Lydon had a face-to-face discussion with Valero’s incident commander to establish a coordination plan.

“They would handle the issue taking place inside the refinery, and I would return to the city’s operation center and manage the impact on the community,” Lydon said.

Lydon also said that calls were placed to activate the siren systems, and three messages were sent out to AlertBenicia’s 5,599 contacts throughout the day. He said sending out evacuation notices “takes a little bit of time.”

“We have to create the message, we have to determine where the evacuation is so that you can put that in the message and send that out,” he said. “You can’t just turn the siren on with no backup information. It takes a few minutes and a few phone calls to make that come together.”

The city also activated its Emergency Operations Centers, where staff members were reassigned from their normal duties. The city also coordinated with the Benicia Unified School District, Caltrans, the California Air Resources Board, Solano County’s Health Department, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, PG&E, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other outside organizations.

Lydon also said the city utilized Channel 27 to share regular updates, held two press conferences at the Benicia Public Library and posted 15 updates on Facebook throughout the day as well as updates on Twitter and Nextdoor, which was shared by all departments. The decision to lift the evacuation was made based on air monitoring done by multiple agencies specializing in the field.

Lydon noted that flaring operations have continued at Valero, and the city had issued press releases to indicate the change from the southern to northern flare in an effort to allow for inspection at the southern flare. He also said that there were two additional releases from the refinery: one from the flue-gas scrubber and another from the coker unit.

“Those are being overseen and reviewed by representatives from the BAAQMD and the Solano County Environmental Health Department,” he said.

Lydon also said that per Title 19 of California’s Code of Regulations, a releases report needs to be filed “as soon as practical but no later than 30 days after the release.” The city is still waiting to file the reports.

Lydon felt the staff was prepared and well-trained, and he noted potential areas for the city to evaluate in the future, including putting out consistent messaging, coordinating with outside agencies, communicating with non-BUSD facilities, coordination with the transit systems and the siren system coverage. The city will continue to evaluate the process and report back with updates, Lydon said.

During the public comment portion, residents raised concerns over health impacts and the communication process. Deborah Morris said she was at the John Muir Lab at about 7:20 that morning when she started to cough, which developed into a full-on asthmatic attack.

“The alarms did not go off until 7:30,” she said. “I was already having difficulty breathing at 7:20.”

Likewise, Constance Beutel, a member of the Good Neighbor Steering Committee, said that she had seen media reports indicating that 10 to 20 people had been sent to the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center after the flaring on May 5. She also expressed concern over the email from Everbridge— the email sending out emergency notification systems through AlertBenicia—because the lack of a city of Benicia logo and the message asking users to click on a link to acknowledge that the message was received made it look suspicious.

“I don’t click on things if I don’t know where it’s going,” she said. “I think it needs some kind of designation.”

Lisa Gilstrap, who lives on Chelsea Hills Drive and reported that she has been coughing ever since the incident, says her house does not have air conditioning so she leaves her window open overnight.

“We’re breathing 100 percent of what’s in the air,” she said.

Benicia resident Cathy Bennett said she appreciated staff’s efforts to keep residents safe but felt that emissions needed to be capped and that labeling the situation as an “incident” was downplaying its impacts.

“We’re not doing ourselves any favors by pretending that we’re safe and we’re protecting our community and our health,” she said.

Representatives from PG&E said the company was investigating specific causes of the outage and had hired a third-party engineering firm.

“We take every outage seriously, and we make sure something like this doesn’t ever happen again,” a representative said.

Mayor Elizabeth Patterson said the city had received suggestions for a community meeting, and the council may take further action at future meetings.

In other business, the council unanimously approved the allocation of funds for Measure C’s remaining Round 1 projects as well as a second reading of the pet miniature pig ordinance that was approved at the May 2 meeting.

The next council meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, May 23 at 6 p.m.