School District Calls Texaco’s Blast Response Inadequate : Health and safety: Besides demanding details of the Oct. 8 explosion, educators want the overall emergency notification procedure improved.

In the wake of the Texaco refinery explosion, some Los Angeles school officials are criticizing what they call an inadequate emergency notification process and asking the refinery for details about what teachers and students are breathing.

In a meeting earlier this week at the 232nd Place School, which is two miles south of the refinery, Los Angeles Unified School District officials say that two weeks after the Oct. 8 explosion, they still don’t know what Texaco blew into the air.

“Is it too much to ask what was that chemical?” asked Susie Wong, director of the environmental, health and safety branch of the school district. “I think the biggest frustration for all of us is just not knowing what it was. In the district we’re trying to collect information and disseminate it, and I still to this day don’t know what Texaco released.”

Representatives from the oil company and local police and fire departments also attended the meeting.

LAUSD Board Member Warren Furutani said that inadequate information from Texaco left the school system unable to answer parents’ questions about the safety of opening school the day after the blast.

“The problem we have is that kids come to school and parents call and say we had a problem last night, so why is school open? And we say, ‘Well we were told it’s OK,’ ” Furutani said. “And that’s not enough. When something as large as Texaco takes place, it’s just not adequate for us to say, ‘We were told it’s OK.’ ”

Oil company representatives defended the refinery and said there was no evidence of any danger to the students from foul air.

“We were doing monitoring right after the explosion and in all of that monitoring we never detected any levels of all the materials that were in the explosion,” said Harry Chandler, assistant plant manager for the Texaco refinery.

“We can tell you the types of materials in that unit that burned, but that might be misleading because that’s not to say they were present at ground level,” Chandler said. A team of investigators is seeking the cause of the blast, he said.

Kindergarten teacher Alan Guttman, who organized the meeting, said the day after the blast, some teachers arrived at 232nd Place school to find their rooms filled with fumes, while others found themselves and their students feeling sick. One pregnant teacher was sent home.

“Personally, I didn’t smell anything in my room when I walked in, but almost immediately I had a headache and felt nauseous,” Guttman said.

The explosion prompted United Teachers-Los Angeles to unanimously vote to urge teachers to look out for themselves during a chemical emergency, in the absence of clear direction from the school district.

A system to warn Carson-area schools about chemical releases was put into place two years ago after a release from the Shell Oil refinery caused children at the 232nd Place School to get sick. Shell no longer has a refinery at the site and uses the space as a storage terminal.

Under the Carson plan, fire officials determine the seriousness of a chemical release--they also decide if people need to be evacuated--and notify the sheriff’s office. The sheriff’s office calls school district police, who in turn notify local schools.

Another component of the plan, a computerized system to telephone residents in the area affected by a chemical release, is close to completion.

Guttman and Furutani, however, said that the notification system for Los Angeles has not worked--in particular for minor releases in the form of noxious odors. Unlike the Carson plan, critics say that schools in Los Angeles are not getting the information on potential dangers fast enough.

School and refinery officials have promised to work together to improve communication during all levels of problems, from minor chemical releases to more serious problems.

Still unresolved, however, are questions regarding how much information about a chemical release should be released to schools, how much information is necessary for the school district to make informed decisions and how that information should be disseminated to teachers.

“We’re not satisfied,” Furutani said after the meeting. “And we will be following up.’

Oil company officials say a pending blitz of information should go a long way in allaying fears among many residents.

That program will be carried out by the South Bay Community Awareness and Emergency Response Association (CAER), an association of emergency response agencies, chemical-using companies and other businesses, which is developing a plan it hopes will answer most questions about what to do in a chemical-release emergency.

“We’re talking about coming out the door with a real extensive community plan--talking to residents, community groups, doing a bilingual newsletter and really listening to what residents’ concerns are,” said Tomi Van de Brooke, a board member of CAER and spokeswoman for Shell Oil Co.