Industrial hub in northwest Portland will cause catastrophic oil spill during earthquake, says report – Blogtown

Fuel tanks along the Willamette River in northwest Portland will be subject to breakage or spillage during an earthquake. Kathleen Marie / Mercury Crew

It’s no surprise that Portland expects one of the world’s worst environmental disasters when the Great Cascadia Earthquake hits. But a new report released on Monday confirmed this looming threat.

The report, commissioned by the City of Portland and Multnomah County, makes an inventory of the Center for Critical Energy Infrastructure (CEI) — a group of fuel storage and transportation tanks located along the Willamette River in northwest Portland — and predicts what will happen to the axis when an earthquake hits the Cascadia subduction zone, or “quake.” Great”.

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The report found that this earthquake could cause one of the largest oil spills in history that would destroy the environment of the Willamette River and nearby residential areas.

“We have known for a long time that the center of critical energy infrastructure and all of the tank farms there pose a really serious threat to the city, county, district, entire state and environment in the earthquake,” the Portland office said. Emergency Management (PBEM) Interim Administrator Juna Papaifthimiou. “There is a desire to take measures to reduce risks, but it appears that the first step in any rational action plan has been to obtain more information.”

The city and county commissioned a CEI Center report in 2019 to do just that. Over the past two years, teams of researchers from ECONorthwest and Salus Resilience have been collecting information about the industrial center through fire regulation records, permit documents and other publicly available records to provide an inventory of materials in the area, and what might be going on. These materials occur in the event of a major earthquake.

There are 630 tanks inside the axle, 415 of which are actively used to accommodate more than 150 different types of fuel, including gasoline, diesel and crude oil. The study reports that each active tank is filled to an average of 67 percent of capacity – the actual amount varies depending on the materials in the tank. This means that the center of the tank currently holds an estimated 233,460,422 gallons of stored fuel, petrochemicals and oil.

But, how much of this toxic material would actually spill out in the event of an earthquake?

The probability of tank failure – tank breakage and leakage – depends on the life of the tank.

Kathleen Marie / Mercury Crew

The researchers estimate that if a tank was built before 1993, it would almost certainly fail due to the limited technology available at the time to build a tank capable of withstanding a seismic event. The report predicts that tanks built before 1993 will release 50 to 100 percent of their stored material in an earthquake. Thanks to advances in design, reservoirs built between 1993 and 2004 are designed to withstand earthquake shaking but not liquefaction or lateral spreading of the ground you are sitting on. The center of the CEI is on backfill ground, so the ground is expected to liquefy and shift during an earthquake. For this reason, researchers expect that up to 10 percent of the material inside tanks built between 1993 and 2004 will leak.

With the addition of new seismic design standards introduced by the city in 2004, reservoirs built after 2004 are now able to withstand vibration and liquefaction. While tanks are unlikely to fail, the report still estimates that newer tanks will release up to 10 percent of the contained material due to pipe connection failures.

Of the tanks actively used, it is assumed that 380 tanks, or about 92 percent, were built before 1993. The report states that 23 tanks were built between 1993 and 2004, and 12 were built after 2004.

From that stockpile, the report estimates that tanks at the CEI Center will release anywhere from 94 million to 194 million gallons of fuel and oil into the Earth and Willamette River.

The maximum spill volume equates to approximately 531 Olympic-size pools, or three hazardous oils, at the Dallas Cowboys AT&T Stadium. The spill will rival the Deepwater Horizon 2010 oil spill, which dumped an estimated 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and is considered one of the world’s worst environmental disasters.

The repercussions of a potential spill vary by season. In the winter, oil spilled into the Willamette River – an estimated 40.8 to 82.5 million gallons – would reach the Pacific Ocean within three days. If the earthquake occurred in the summer, it would take about 15 days for the oil to spread into the ocean.

Regardless of the season, the report estimates that about 55 percent of the oil spilled into the water will evaporate into the air or burn during a river fire within three days. Residual oil will remain in the water and must be cleaned by hazmat crews. The report does not estimate how long the cleaning process will take.

The effects on human life are not fully known, but are assumed to be catastrophic. The two postal codes closest to the industrial center — 97231 and 97210 in the Lynton neighborhood — have a total population of 16,508 and a total working population of 31,517, according to the report.

Linton resident Sarah Taylor lives half a mile from the nearest tank and keeps an emergency backpack near her front door with supplies to evacuate at any moment.

“In the bathroom we have rolls of plastic and duct tape, because we’re supposed to cover all windows and vents in case there are toxic fumes,” Taylor said. “[The city] He said don’t try to run, just score one room – they recommend a bathroom – and you go in there with your cell phone and charger and then you punch yourself. I don’t think most people in Portland have been asked to do that which–that.”

According to a county spokesperson, none of Portland’s bridges, including the newly built Telecom Crossing, are expected to withstand the Cascadia earthquake. This means that Linton residents will not be able to escape from the area via St. John’s Bridge. It’s also possible that Forest Park caught fire during the earthquake, closing another escape route for people living next to the CEI Center. Portland Fire & Rescue (PFR) representatives say they will act to the best of their abilities after the earthquake, but that the scale of devastation will be beyond their capabilities.

“Our hazmat team is always planning things, but this will be on a scale that is honestly beyond our capabilities,” said PFR’s Terry Foster.

“We really appreciated their candor, because we didn’t want to be under the impression that someone was coming to save us,” said Nancy Heiser, a member of the Linton Neighborhood Association. “We’ll all be somewhat on our own if it’s as massive as expected, so we’re trying to build our resilience and trying to get smarter.”

The Linnton Neighborhood Association has written letters to the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), which represents some of the companies in the CEI Hub, in an effort to obtain more information about the hub’s security. They received a response stating that the tanks at the CEI Center were compliant with design requirements at the time of their construction, and that “all storage tanks are designed, built, and maintained to strict standards and meet or exceed appropriate federal and state laws.”

We all like to believe [petroleum industry when they say] We’re safe, but I don’t think any of us think so,” said Sean Looney, another member of the neighborhood group. “I think we all believe in the scientists who say those tanks are in liquefiable soil, they won’t hold up and they’ll vibrate and they’ll create a spark and they’ll explode.”

Multnomah County Commissioner Sharon Miran, an early proponent of commissioning a CEI report in 2019, wasn’t surprised by anything the report found.

“We didn’t really need the report to tell us things were really bad,” said Miran, whose district includes the CEI Hub. “Just drive past the place and you can see it looks like some kind of post-apocalyptic zone. What we needed was a report that really quantified the damage that would show the scope, scale and extent of damage likely to occur in the event of a major earthquake.”

The city and county needed the data from the CEI Hub report to move to the next stage of the report: determining who was responsible for the costs associated with the catastrophic oil spill.

The July 26 report is technically just a draft. According to Papaefthimiou of PBEM, the city is releasing a draft CEI Hub report in order to gain insight from community members and fill in any gaps that researchers may have missed. Papaefthimiou anticipates that tribal members may provide more information about how the oil spill affected hunting and cultural practices, or companies at the CEI may add more details about their facilities that were not publicly available.

Once public comments are taken into account, the research team will begin to calculate the economic costs related to the oil spill. This report is expected to be released in October 2021.

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“Our underlying desire to understand the costs is partly the desire to create financial accountability for the clean-up,” said Papaifthimiou. But in the end, if they do a huge amount of damage and then pay a huge amount of money to fix it, there are still losses that are not compensated. Lives lost are irreplaceable, family homes lost, tribal treaty rights lost are really cultural and spiritual losses you can’t put in a dollar.”

Papaefthimiou hopes when the research team comes up with a dollar number representing clean-up costs — costs that local agencies plan to hold the fossil fuel industries to account for — companies that use the hub will start to be more proactive about retrofitting their old tanks.

“When we fully understand how huge the costs are, perhaps retrofits can suddenly start to look like a more economically sensible measure,” Papaefthimiou said.

City and county officials haven’t mentioned any other preventative solutions to a potential oil spill besides incentivizing fossil fuel companies to adjust their tanks.

Obtaining a dollar estimate of the economic impacts of the oil spill will also help domestic policy makers begin to develop policies that clearly place the financial burden on the fossil fuel industry.

“One of the exciting elements of this work is discovering some innovative ways we can hold the industry accountable for the potential harm their policies and products cause and how they store these fuels,” said County Commissioner Meiran.

Putting liability on fossil fuel companies is reminiscent of Portland’s current conflict with Zenith Energy. Zenith, a fossil fuel company with tanks at the CEI Hub, is seeking permission from the city to expand its station. While environmental advocates say the city has a strong legal standing to deny Zenith’s permit, it is unclear whether the city’s risk-averse lawyers are willing to risk engaging in a long and costly legal battle with the company.

Creating a policy that makes the fossil fuel industry financially responsible for spills at the CEI opens the county to potential legal battles. While the county is not inclined to spend taxpayer money on extensive litigation, Miran hasn’t dismissed the idea entirely.

“We need to push the envelope to do everything we can to hold the industry accountable,” Miran said.

The public will be able to provide feedback on the draft report and provide insight into other things to consider during the August 4 virtual community engagement session.

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