Richmond, California
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Publius
24 October 2026.
The Air District has posted its account of Thursday night. It runs two pages, which is about right for something that happened mostly in the dark. The complaints began at 6:09 p.m. By seven, the District’s monitor on Seventh Street was reading a one-hour average above 200 parts per billion of hydrogen sulfide. The state’s acute reference level is 30. By about half past eight, inspectors had traced the smell to the Castro Street and Richmond Parkway area, where it was strongest at Vernon Avenue and Seventh. At 10:45 they were inside the refinery with Chevron staff, and together they traced it to an area just downwind of the flares.
At 12:19 a.m., Chevron sent a Level 1 Community Warning System alert. It gave the time of the release as 12:10 a.m.
I want to stay with that number for a minute, because it is the only entry in the report that comes from the refinery. Everything else belongs to the District: the complaint log, the monitors, the wind speeds, the heat map of more than 130 complaints. The alert is Chevron’s own entry, and it says the release began nine minutes before the alert went out. The District answers in the mild prose agencies use when they mean something firmly. Complaints and its own staff’s observations, it says, “suggest the release occurred hours earlier.” By the clock, the listed start time came six hours after the first complaint. It came nearly four hours after inspectors had traced the smell to the Castro Street area, and an hour and a half after they were standing in the refinery.
So here is the proposition, and it is a small one. A warning that comes after the smell, and dates the event to just before its own arrival, is not a warning. It is a receipt. Receipts are useful. They are just not what the siren is for.
Consider what the warning was supposed to beat. If you were on Vernon Avenue at seven on Thursday, you didn’t need an alert. You had the air itself, the kind that gets into the car with the windows up and stays in the coat for a day. The District says its Seventh Street station stayed over the reference level for six of the nine hours between five in the evening and one in the morning. For most of that stretch, the official record of the release did not yet exist. The nose and the warning system disagreed by about six hours, and the nose had the better timekeeping.
I don’t know why the alert came when it did, and the report doesn’t say. It says the source inside the refinery “has not yet been identified” and that the investigation is ongoing. I won’t supply a source, and nobody else should either. A company is entitled to an investigation. Residents are entitled to the clock.
By the kind of coincidence that only a municipal calendar can produce, the Council has both halves of this on Tuesday’s agenda, posted before anyone smelled anything. At four in the afternoon, the Air District presents its preliminary Health Risk Assessment of the refinery. That item was set for October 6 and continued. The Council put off hearing about the air. The air did not wait. Then at the regular meeting, under R.1, comes a first reading of an amendment to the Industrial Safety Ordinance. It shifts the County’s hazardous-materials programs, which implement and enforce that ordinance, from Contra Costa Health to the county fire district.
The agenda language is about who enforces. It doesn’t say who keeps the clock. Does the warning system move along with the programs? Does anything in Chapter 6.43 say when a release is deemed to have started, and who gets to say so? Is there a consequence when the listed time and the District’s observations differ by most of an evening? The ordinance amendment wasn’t written for Thursday, and that is exactly why these questions are worth asking now. Rules get rewritten at quiet moments, and this one isn’t quiet anymore.
One more piece of bookkeeping. According to the Finance Director on October 20, the City held an estimated $99.7 million on September 30 from its settlement with this same refinery, and it earns interest every day. That money is about the past. Thursday was the present, and the present arrived at 6:09 p.m. while the paperwork, as far as the record shows, arrived after midnight.
The Council meets Tuesday, October 27: the Air District at 4:00 p.m., and the ordinance at the regular meeting at 6:00. Written comments on the District’s preliminary Health Risk Analysis close November 23 at 5:00 p.m. Will anyone on the dais ask what time it was?
— Publius
Sources: Air District incident report, Oct. 22 · Council agenda, Oct. 27 · Council digest, Oct. 20 · KCRT video, Council Oct. 20 · City news page · Publius, No. 26