The “Worst-Case Scenario” Was a Fiction

How Valero’s Wilmington Refinery Ran Hydrofluoric Acid Alkylation Next to a California Community With Broken Plans, Missing Paperwork, and a 13-Day Silence on Toxic Gas Releases

Source: U.S. EPA Docket No. MM-09-2025-0061 | Filed: May 8, 2025 | Region IX | Wilmington, CA

Wilmington is a neighborhood in Los Angeles. It is a working-class, majority-Latino community sandwiched between the Port of Los Angeles, rail yards, and one of the heaviest concentrations of industrial facilities in California. The people who live there did not choose to live next to a refinery that uses hydrofluoric acid, one of the most acutely lethal industrial chemicals that exists, to process petroleum. They live there because they live there, because generations of environmental sacrifice zoning have stacked industrial hazards on top of communities that have the least political power to push back.

Ultramar, Inc., a Nevada corporation doing business as Valero Wilmington Refinery, has operated at 2402 East Anaheim Street in that community for years. The EPA’s Consent Agreement and Final Order, signed and filed on May 8, 2025, documents what happened when federal inspectors showed up on June 2 and 3, 2022, and looked closely at what the company had actually been doing to protect the people living around its HF alkylation process. What they found was a pattern of federal law violations that touched every layer of the safety system: the emergency plans were based on wrong data, the safety diagrams were inaccurate, the hazard analyses were incomplete, the operating procedures were missing required information, 19 incident investigation reports were incomplete, and toxic gas releases to the community went unreported for hours or, in one case, over 13 days.

The Non-Financial Ledger: The Cost That Doesn’t Appear in the Settlement

There is a version of this story that Valero and its lawyers would prefer you to focus on. In that version, a company self-regulated imperfectly, EPA did its job, a settlement was reached, and compliance was restored. Everyone played their role. The system worked. That version is a story told entirely in dollar amounts and regulatory citations, and it leaves out the most important part: what it actually means to live in Wilmington, California, next to a refinery running a hydrofluoric acid process, with a company that has been modeling its worst-case disaster scenario using the wrong numbers.

Hydrofluoric acid is not a bureaucratic abstraction. HF is a substance that dissolves tissue, penetrates skin on contact, travels into the bloodstream, strips calcium from bones, and can cause cardiac arrest through systemic poisoning even from exposures that initially appear minor. Industrial-scale HF, the kind used in petroleum alkylation, represents a mass-casualty risk in densely populated areas. The entire point of the EPA’s Risk Management Program, under CAA Section 112(r)(7), is to force companies to produce an honest accounting of what a worst-case release would actually do: how far the toxic cloud would travel, what population lies within that distance, how first responders should react, and what the community should know. Valero failed that test. Per the EPA’s own findings, Respondent used incorrect release quantities and release rates in modeling its worst-case toxic gas release scenario. That is not a paperwork technicality. That is the company telling the government and the community: our plan for the worst day is built on fiction.

When you strip away the regulatory language, what Count I of this order actually says is this: Valero did not correctly calculate how far a catastrophic HF release would spread, or how fast. Every family within the actual danger zone who believed they were outside it, based on the company’s published planning, was carrying false confidence. Emergency managers who relied on those numbers for evacuation planning, shelter-in-place protocols, or resource pre-positioning were working from a map of a territory that Valero had drawn wrong. There is no way to put a dollar value on what it means to live for years believing you are safe when the company responsible for that calculation got it wrong.

Count IV goes even deeper into the negligence. A 2009 process hazard analysis, the formal safety review the company is required to conduct on its own HF process, produced a recommendation. That recommendation was specifically about whether the facility’s water drainage system could adequately handle acidic wastewater during an HF release. In plain terms: if HF starts leaking, does the facility have the infrastructure to contain the acid-contaminated water that results from mitigation efforts, so it doesn’t flood into the surrounding environment? The experts who conducted that analysis in 2009 said: check this. Fix this. That recommendation sat unresolved. The EPA showed up in June 2022. Thirteen years had passed. The recommendation from the 2009 PHA revalidation, related to failure of the water drainage system to adequately handle acidic wastewater during an HF release, had still not been promptly addressed. Thirteen years. This is the timeline of a company that understood the paperwork obligation to document a recommendation and understood that actually fixing the problem cost money.

Count VI adds its own layer of institutional indifference. Between 2018 and 2021, the facility investigated nineteen incidents that resulted in, or could reasonably have resulted in, a catastrophic release. These are the close calls, the near misses, the moments where something nearly went very wrong at a facility processing hydrofluoric acid next to a residential community. The investigation reports on those nineteen incidents were missing a basic required data point: the date on which each investigation began. This is not a complex technical failure. It is the refinery industry equivalent of not dating your incident report. The reason that date matters is traceability and accountability: if you don’t record when an investigation started, you cannot verify how quickly the company responded, whether it dragged its feet, whether it prioritized production over safety review. Nineteen reports. Over three years. The pattern is consistent.

Then there is the issue of the sulfur dioxide releases, and this is where the human story becomes impossible to sanitize. Sulfur dioxide is a respiratory irritant. In sufficient concentrations it causes bronchospasm, pulmonary edema, and permanent lung damage. The EPA designates it an “extremely hazardous substance,” and federal law under EPCRA Section 304 requires that when a release reaches or exceeds the reportable quantity, the company must immediately notify emergency authorities. Not within a few hours. Immediately. On June 11, 2018, Valero knew about a sulfur dioxide release at 1:01am. They called CalOES at 3:27am: a 146-minute gap. On June 1, 2020, they knew at 11:19pm and called at 12:17am the next day: a 58-minute gap. These delays are bad. The May 2021 incident is in a different category entirely. Valero had actual or constructive knowledge of the sulfur dioxide release at 3:05pm on May 28, 2021. They did not notify CalOES until 10:59am on June 10, 2021. That is thirteen days and almost eight hours. Thirteen days during which no emergency authority received formal notification that a hazardous substance release had occurred at a major industrial facility in a densely populated community. For thirteen days, the people of Wilmington had no official acknowledgment from any government body that anything had happened, because the company that was required to trigger that acknowledgment had not made the call.

Legal Receipts: What the Order Actually Says, Verbatim

Every quote below is drawn directly from U.S. EPA Docket No. MM-09-2025-0061. These are not paraphrases. These are the words the federal government put on paper.

“Respondent is Ultramar, Inc., a Nevada corporation, dba Valero Wilmington Refinery (‘Respondent’). At all times relevant to this CA/FO, Respondent operated a facility (the ‘Facility’) located at 2402 East Anaheim Street, Wilmington, California, that refines petroleum products using a hydrofluoric acid alkylation process.”

Section D, General Allegations, Paragraphs 14-15 — establishing the identity of the facility and the process involved

“Based upon the Inspection and subsequent investigation, EPA asserts that Respondent failed to use an appropriate release quantity and release rate in modeling its worst-case toxic gas release scenario.”

Section E, Count I, Paragraph 21 — the worst-case scenario was modeled incorrectly

“Accordingly, EPA alleges that by failing to use appropriate modeling parameters in modeling its worst-case release of a toxic gas, Respondent violated the offsite consequence analysis requirements set forth at CAA Section 112(r)(7), 42 U.S.C. § 7412(r)(7), and 40 C.F.R. § 68.25.”

Section E, Count I, Paragraph 22 — the legal violation resulting from the flawed modeling

“Based upon the Inspection and subsequent investigation, EPA asserts that Respondent failed to maintain accurate P&IDs for process equipment depicted in two P&IDs.”

Section E, Count II, Paragraph 25 — inaccurate piping and instrument diagrams

“Based upon the Inspection and subsequent investigation, EPA asserts that Respondent did not adequately address the consequences of a loss of power to the entire unit on safety and mitigation systems and failed to analyze the safety and health effects from such power loss in its process hazard analysis.”

Section E, Count III, Paragraph 29 — no analysis of what happens when the entire unit loses power

“Based upon the Inspection and subsequent investigation, EPA asserts that Respondent failed to promptly address and resolve a recommendation from its 2009 Reduced Volatility Alkylation Process PHA revalidation, related to failure of the water drainage system to adequately handle acidic wastewater during an HF release.”

Section E, Count IV, Paragraph 33 — a 2009 HF safety recommendation unresolved as of 2022

“Based upon the Inspection and subsequent investigation, EPA asserts that Respondent failed to directly include information related to operating limits, safety and health considerations, and safety systems in the operating procedures and ‘Job Aids’ reviewed by EPA inspectors.”

Section E, Count V, Paragraph 37 — critical safety information missing from written procedures

“Based upon the Inspection and subsequent investigation, EPA asserts that Respondent failed to include the dates on which incident investigations began in nineteen incident investigation reports between 2018 and 2021.”

Section E, Count VI, Paragraph 41 — 19 incomplete incident investigation reports over three years

“On June 11, 2018, Respondent’s Facility released a RQ of sulfur dioxide. Respondent had actual or constructive knowledge of the sulfur dioxide release at 1:01am, but Respondent failed to notify the California Office of Emergency Services (‘CalOES’) until 3:27am on June 11, 2018.”

Section E, Count VII, Paragraph 44 — 2018 sulfur dioxide release, 146-minute delay in notification

“On June 1, 2020, Respondent released a RQ of sulfur dioxide from the Facility. Respondent had actual or constructive knowledge of the sulfur dioxide release at 11:19pm, but Respondent failed to notify the California Office of Emergency Services (‘CalOES’) until 12:17am on June 2, 2020.”

Section E, Count VIII, Paragraph 47 — 2020 sulfur dioxide release, 58-minute delay in notification

“On May 28, 2021, Respondent released a RQ of sulfur dioxide from the Facility. Respondent had actual or constructive knowledge of the sulfur dioxide release at 3:05pm on May 28, 2021, but Respondent failed to notify CalOES until 10:59am on June 10, 2021.”

Section E, Count IX, Paragraph 50 — 2021 sulfur dioxide release, over 13-day delay in notification

“Respondent agrees to pay a civil penalty in the amount of TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THOUSAND, FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN DOLLARS ($270,437) (‘Assessed Penalty’) within ninety (90) calendar days of the Effective Date of this CA/FO.”

Section F, Civil Penalty, Paragraph 52 — the total financial consequence for all nine violations

“Respondent: (a) admits the jurisdictional allegations of this CA/FO; (b) neither admits nor denies specific factual allegations contained in this CA/FO; (c) consents to the assessment of the civil penalty set forth in Section F above and to any conditions specified in this CA/FO; and (d) waives any right to contest the allegations and its right to appeal the final order accompanying this consent agreement.”

Section G, Admissions and Waivers of Rights, Paragraph 59 — Valero pays and walks away without admitting wrongdoing

“In executing this CA/FO, Respondent certifies that under penalty of law to EPA that it has taken all steps necessary to return to full compliance with CAA Section 112(r), 42 U.S.C. § 7412(r), and its implementing regulations, that formed the basis for the violations alleged in this CA/FO.”

Section H, Certification of Compliance, Paragraph 61 — the company’s self-certification of current compliance

“Full compliance with this CA/FO shall only resolve Respondent’s liability for federal civil penalties for the violations specifically alleged herein and does not in any case affect the right of the EPA to pursue appropriate injunctive or other equitable relief or criminal sanctions for any violations of law.”

Section K, Reservation of Rights, Paragraph 69 — the door is still open for further enforcement

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays When Valero Doesn’t

Environmental Degradation

The violations documented in this EPA order do not exist in isolation. They represent the cumulative environmental burden placed on Wilmington and the surrounding communities of the South Bay Los Angeles area, a region already identified by California’s CalEnviroScreen as among the most environmentally burdened in the entire state. The Valero Wilmington Refinery sits within a cluster of industrial facilities where petroleum processing, shipping operations, and heavy trucking overlap. Every gap in safety documentation, every unresolved process hazard recommendation, every incorrectly modeled release scenario compounds the environmental risk that residents already carry.

The finding that Valero failed to accurately model its worst-case hydrofluoric acid release scenario is particularly significant from an environmental standpoint. HF released into the atmosphere in sufficient quantities does not simply dissipate. It forms a ground-hugging aerosol cloud that travels with wind patterns. The EPA’s own Program 3 requirements, which Valero is subject to, exist precisely because the downwind environmental and ecological consequences of an HF release at an industrial scale can extend far beyond the immediate facility perimeter. When the model that defines that perimeter uses wrong release quantities and wrong release rates, the environmental contingency plans built from that model are wrong too. Soil, water systems, and the broader air shed all sit downstream of a planning failure that the company apparently let persist until federal inspectors arrived.

The unresolved 2009 recommendation on the water drainage system’s capacity to handle acidic wastewater during an HF release carries direct environmental implications. Acidic wastewater contaminated with HF residues entering storm drains, soil, or groundwater represents a category of environmental harm that does not require a mass-casualty event to be devastating. Slow, chronic contamination from inadequate drainage infrastructure at a facility running an acid alkylation process is the kind of incremental environmental degradation that communities like Wilmington absorb over decades without ever receiving a full accounting. The thirteen-year delay in addressing that recommendation is a thirteen-year window during which that risk remained unmitigated.

Public Health

Sulfur dioxide is a known respiratory hazard. At concentrations above the EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards, it triggers asthma attacks, aggravates chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and can cause acute bronchospasm in otherwise healthy individuals. Children, the elderly, and people with pre-existing respiratory conditions are most vulnerable. Wilmington has elevated rates of asthma hospitalization. The South Bay Los Angeles industrial corridor has been documented as a community with respiratory disease burdens that correlate directly with industrial air pollutant exposure.

Three separate sulfur dioxide releases at or above the reportable quantity threshold occurred at the Valero Wilmington facility in 2018, 2020, and 2021. Federal law required immediate notification to CalOES in each case. The purpose of that notification is not administrative box-checking. It is so that local emergency managers, public health officials, and community members can take protective actions: issue shelter-in-place advisories, warn people with respiratory conditions, mobilize medical response, close windows and ventilation systems in schools and hospitals in the vicinity. When Valero waited 146 minutes in 2018, or 58 minutes in 2020, or thirteen days in 2021, those protective actions were either delayed or never triggered at all. For every minute of that delay, people in the surrounding community were breathing air that emergency response protocols said they should have been protected from, without any warning, without any advisory, without any choice.

The public health implications of the flawed worst-case HF release modeling extend beyond any single incident. Hydrofluoric acid inhalation, even at sub-lethal levels, causes pulmonary edema and long-term respiratory damage. Skin absorption of HF can trigger systemic fluoride poisoning that causes potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias hours after apparent exposure. The community surrounding the Valero Wilmington Refinery has, in effect, been operating under an emergency preparedness plan that used the wrong parameters. Their evacuation zones, their shelter-in-place advisories, their emergency room protocols, all of these downstream systems rest on the accuracy of the initial worst-case release modeling. Valero got that modeling wrong, and the people who would have paid the price for that error in a real release event are the same people who had no input, no knowledge, and no recourse.

The finding that Valero’s process hazard analysis failed to adequately address the consequences of a complete loss of power to the entire HF alkylation unit adds another public health dimension. A full power loss at an HF processing facility is precisely the kind of scenario where safety and mitigation systems fail simultaneously, where manual override becomes the only option, and where the consequences of inadequate planning become acute and immediate. By failing to analyze what a complete power loss does to the safety systems on the HF unit, Valero left its own workers, emergency responders, and the surrounding community exposed to a category of risk that the company had officially decided not to think through.

Economic Inequality

The geography of this case is the first and most important economic fact. Wilmington is one of the most industrially burdened, economically disadvantaged communities in Los Angeles. It is not an accident that a major petroleum refinery using hydrofluoric acid alkylation sits in Wilmington rather than in Bel Air or Pasadena. The siting of industrial hazards in low-income, communities of color is a documented, studied, and named phenomenon: environmental racism. The people who live closest to this refinery, who breathe its air, who send their children to schools within the toxic endpoint radius, are disproportionately Latino, disproportionately working class, and disproportionately people whose political and economic power to relocate or to pressure government for stronger oversight is limited.

The civil penalty of $270,437, spread across nine violations and years of documented non-compliance, represents the economic calculus at the heart of this system. Valero, which is a subsidiary operation of one of the largest independent petroleum refiners in the United States, agreed to pay a penalty that, in the context of refinery operating economics, functions as a minor cost of doing business. There is no published figure in the source document for Valero’s annual revenues from the Wilmington operation. What is documented is that the company chose, for thirteen years, not to resolve a safety recommendation about its HF acid wastewater drainage system. The economic logic of that choice is straightforward: fixing the drainage system costs money. Carrying an unresolved recommendation in a safety file costs nothing, until an EPA inspector arrives.

The residents of Wilmington do not have the option to simply pay a fine and walk away from the risk. They cannot waive liability and move on. For the families living within the actual worst-case release endpoint, which was modeled incorrectly by the company and may be larger than the community was told, the economic exposure is total: health care costs for respiratory illness, property values depressed by industrial proximity, lost wages from pollution-related illness, and the invisible but real cost of chronic stress and anxiety that comes from knowing you live next to a facility that has demonstrated, across nine federal violations, that its safety documentation cannot be trusted. No settlement resolves that ledger. The $270,437 does not touch it.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now: The Watchlist and Your Next Move

The order is final. The penalty is paid. Valero has certified compliance. But the document itself makes clear that this settlement does not resolve the EPA’s right to pursue injunctive relief, equitable relief, or criminal sanctions for violations of law. The door is not closed. Here is who you watch and what you do:

Executives Named in the Document

• Christine James, Vice President and General Manager, Ultramar, Inc. dba Valero Wilmington Refinery — the named respondent contact. Address: 2402 East Anaheim Street, Wilmington, CA 90744.
• Amy C. Miller-Bowen, Director, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region IX — the named complainant authority who signed this order.
• Beatrice Wong, Regional Judicial Officer, EPA Region IX — the officer who issued the Final Order.

Regulatory Watchlist

• U.S. EPA Region IX: The authority that brought this action. Monitor their enforcement docket at epa.gov for follow-up inspections, new violations, or additional actions against this facility. Docket reference: MM-09-2025-0061.
• California Air Resources Board (CARB): California’s own air quality enforcement arm operates independently of the EPA. File a complaint about this facility’s air emissions directly at arb.ca.gov.
• South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD): The local air district with jurisdiction over Los Angeles Basin facilities. Report air quality concerns at aqmd.gov or call their air quality complaint line.
• CalOES (California Office of Emergency Services): The agency Valero was supposed to notify immediately during each sulfur dioxide release. They have a public right-to-know portal at caloes.ca.gov.
• California OSHA (Cal/OSHA): The process safety violations described here, particularly the incomplete process hazard analysis and flawed worst-case modeling, also fall within Cal/OSHA’s Process Safety Management jurisdiction. Worker safety complaints can be filed at dir.ca.gov/dosh.
• U.S. EPA Chemical Emergency Preparedness and Prevention Office: The federal body that oversees RMP compliance nationally. Public RMP data for this facility can be accessed at rmp.epa.gov.

Grassroots and Community Action

• Connect with Wilmington-based environmental justice organizations: The communities most affected by this facility’s violations already have organized networks fighting for accountability. Seek out and fund local mutual aid and advocacy groups in the Wilmington, San Pedro, and South Bay LA area who work on industrial pollution.
• Request the updated Risk Management Plan: Now that Valero has certified compliance, the revised RMP, including the corrected worst-case release modeling, should be publicly accessible. Submit a public records request to EPA and to SCAQMD to obtain and review the updated document. If the new model significantly expands the endpoint radius, your community deserves to know.
• Attend Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) meetings: EPCRA, the same law Valero violated three times with its late sulfur dioxide notifications, created LEPCs specifically to give communities a seat at the table on industrial chemical risk. Find your LEPC at epa.gov/epcra and show up.
• Push for AB-regulated disclosure at the state level: California has some of the strongest environmental laws in the country. Contact your state assembly member and senator to demand stricter enforcement timelines, higher penalties, and mandatory community notification requirements for toxic releases in environmental justice communities.