A city beats back Chevron.

• Author: Helvarg, David

On August 6, 2012, I heard Chevrons alarm sirens in my home just two miles away from the company's huge refinery complex in Richmond, California. But rather than shelter in place (as the emergency response system would have instructed me to had it worked that day), I went out by the water to take photos of the thick black column of smoke rising over the hills where the number four crude distillation unit had caught fire and raged for hours.

The accident eventually sent 15,000 people to area hospitals complaining of burning eyes, nausea, and respiratory distress. Later, the California OSHA fined Chevron nearly a million dollars for safety violations, such as failing to replace corroded pipe that ruptured and fueled the fire. The city of Richmond also filed a major lawsuit against Chevron, while the company pleaded "no contest" to six criminal charges brought by the county DA and state attorney general and agreed to pay a $2 million fine.

Approaching the first anniversary of the fire, some 2,500 protesters marched from the local BART (mass transit) station to the refinery gates, where 209 of them, including author and climate activist Bill McKibben, were peacefully arrested.

Today, I'm taking a tour of the refinery. I'm told that it opened in 1902 to produce kerosene six years before Henry Ford introduced the Model T that popularized gas-driven automobiles. In 2013, the refinery earned $2 billion for Chevron, the world's eleventh-largest corporation. Today, the refinery employs some 1,200 workers.

The refinery is a metallic Legoland of furnace stacks, cooling towers, heat exchangers, flares, boilers, a thirty-nine-acre algal green wastewater treatment pond, and more. There's the big fluid catalytic cracker unit, and the distillation and reforming towers that separate hydrocarbons by their boiling points. There's the polymer plant to produce additives like Techron that was invented in the adjoining tech center, a lube production area (that produces 100 percent of West Coast lubricants), a hydro-processor for removing sulfur from oil, and endless-seeming thickets of pipeline above and below the pier, roads, and rail tracks--6,000 miles in total--hopefully none corroding in ways that have contributed to fires and explosions most recently in 1999, 2007, and 2012. There are black rail cars to carry liquefied petroleum gases such as propane and butane, and a marketing terminal where gasoline trucks pick up product for the Bay Area. The morning I visit, there are two ships tied up at the Chevron Long Wharf pumping crude oil ashore (some thirteen million gallons a day) to hillside storage tanks where more pipeline links them to twenty refining units.

The refinery produces 20 percent of the region's gasoline and 65 percent of its aviation fuel. Chevron's is the largest of five refineries located along an East Bay petrochemical corridor of low-income communities that may soon include large numbers of oil trains rumbling through residential...