Judge Weighs 2 Firms’ Bids for Refinery Adviser

Retired Superior Court Judge Harry V. Peetris on Thursday began deliberating which of two large consulting firms is best qualified to assist him in overseeing safety at the Mobil Oil Corp. refinery in Torrance.

Peetris gave no hint of how long he will take to decide on a firm, but he suggested that the choice will not be easy.

“You’ve presented a difficult decision,” Peetris told the legal teams from Mobil and the city of Torrance after they completed a two-day hearing in a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles. He added, however: “It is resolvable.”

Attorneys for Mobil argued in favor of their nominee, Westinghouse Electric Corp., while Torrance’s lawyers spoke for the city’s nominee, SRI International of Menlo Park.

Peetris has the final say in deciding which firm will be hired to serve as the court-supervised safety adviser, a job that is central to an October, 1990, consent decree signed by the city and the oil company. The consent decree settled a public-nuisance lawsuit brought by the city against Mobil after a series of accidents at the 750-acre refinery in north Torrance.

From the start, Mobil attempted to undercut SRI by suggesting that its staff lacks practical experience in refinery and petrochemical issues.

The city, in turn, tried to show that Westinghouse’s experience is weighted heavily toward nuclear energy, and that two key people who would work with Westinghouse on the project lack long-term refinery experience.

One witness called by Mobil was Hans K. Fauske of Fauske & Associates Inc., of Burr Ridge, Ill., who would assist Westinghouse with the project. A Mobil attorney highlighted Fauske’s expertise in modeling particular physical processes, calling him one of the world’s foremost experts in his field. But in cross-examination by the city, Fauske said about 75% of his firm’s work deals with nuclear energy and only 25% with the chemical industry, including petroleum.

Mobil attorney Max L. Gillam, in his closing arguments, praised Westinghouse’s credentials and said the firm’s proposal lists nine professional engineers, compared to only four for SRI.

In one of the hearing’s most dramatic exchanges, Ralph Nutter, an attorney for the city, sharply questioned Westinghouse representative B. Griffith Holmes--who would be the firm’s project director in Torrance--about his involvement with an incinerator project that Westinghouse agreed to build near Bloomington, Ind., as part of the settlement in 1985 of a federal pollution lawsuit.

According to news accounts at the time, Westinghouse agreed to clean up six sites near Bloomington where it had dumped polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and to build the incinerator to destroy those wastes.

Holmes acknowledged that he was involved with a risk assessment related to the Westinghouse project, and Nutter chided him for not stating in his resume that he had been involved with a consent decree in the past.

“Did you think the judge might be interested that Westinghouse had a consent decree entered against it (in an environmental case)?” Nutter asked.

Holmes responded that his project was not mandated by the consent decree but simply associated with it.

The cost of the seven-year safety adviser job, a major source of debate between Torrance and Mobil, also resurfaced Thursday.

In a proposal submitted earlier, Westinghouse had estimated the cost at only $350,000--a figure the city has criticized as insufficient.

But in testimony Thursday, Holmes said the total cost of the Westinghouse proposal could go as high as $1 million.

Although Westinghouse representatives refused to elaborate, Mobil spokesman James Carbonetti said Thursday evening that the $1 million figure was intended as “an absolute maximum” if unexpected costs emerged.

In the course of testimony Thursday, SRI updated its own estimates. The firm had previously said the first phase of the four-phase project would cost from $325,000 to more than $1 million, but William K. Ralston, manager of the SRI Environmental Business Program, testified that the first phase might take as little as 100 days and cost $500,000.

Under tough questioning from a Mobil attorney, SRI officials still declined to put a price tag on the total project, saying too many unknowns remain. Mobil, which will be paying the full cost of the safety adviser, has repeatedly criticized SRI for not providing more specific estimates.