"Activists say hydrofluoric acid, which is widely used in the petroleum industry, presents a real and unnecessary risk. Oil refiners disagree."
"Torrance, California is a tidy community of mostly mid-century homes situated between Los Angeles and Long Beach. It boasts a beautiful shoreline, an art museum, and nearly 150,000 residents who, with some bad luck, came very close to a toxic calamity in early 2015. An explosion at one of the sprawling oil refineries in the area sent an 80,000-pound piece of equipment hurtling through the air before it landed just feet from a tank containing a modified version of hydrofluoric acid. It was a close call: Had the acid tank been smashed, a deadly chemical cloud could have devastated this bedroom community.
Citing a federal investigation into the accident, Vanessa Allen Sutherland, then chairwoman of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, said it had the “potential to be catastrophic.”
It’s easy to see why: Under intense pressure, hydrofluoric acid has the potential to form an airborne aerosol cloud when released. Such a noxious vapor can immediately penetrate skin and destroy tissue — and it can travel for miles depending on weather conditions. It’s the sort of nightmarish scenario that infamously befell residents of Bhopal, India, where a leak of a different gas, methyl isocyanate, went undetected at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in 1984 — an event that killed thousands of people."
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