Bad Neighbors

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Fire at the Chevron Richmond Refinery as seen from the Tiburon Peninsula, 6 August 2012: photo by Frank Schulenberg
 

With the breaking of dawn a whitish yellow pall hangs over the sky to the north, where the big Chevron refinery exploded last night. The resulting blaze tore through the giant refinery, spewing sulfuric acid and nitrogen dioxide and sending a toxic smoke plume 4000 feet into the air. Nearby residents were advised by an automated telephone warning system to "shelter in place". “Go inside, shut your doors and windows. Keep the outside air, the smoke, from getting inside your home.”  In the crepuscular haze, people fled to hospitals with burning eyes and breathing problems.

A Chevron spokesman apologized for “inconveniencing our neighbors.”

The main distillation unit at the Chevron installation in Richmond produces about one eighth of California’s refined oil.

 

Downtown later in the night I was sorting out the emergency preparedness news items as they came in through my one-earplug walkman radio.

A facemasked young man on a bike stopped and called out, "Hey, you shouldn't be out here without a mask. I'd give you one, but I just gave away the last one I had. Except the two that I'm wearing. You really need to double your mask, or the fine particulates will get through."

This act of good Samaritanism touched the ancient flinty heart. I hobbled on unmasked into the darkness toward the Tunnel, beyond which lay The Cloud.

Time was, as some decades back when the poem below was writ, it remained possible to see in these chemical fires started by our Bad Neighbors a strange end-of-species aesthetic glamour. Now, not so much.

First cold winter twilights despite this
week’s Richmond refinery fire
never more perfect even the
burned and corrupt air stunning
saffron violet orange indigo
becoming blood red as sun descends
with a delayed shudder or retarded
tremor into ocean fire
and night begins to close in
over the whole sky from other
(eastern) end -- a deep blue bowl

or dish inverted convex
glass dome extruded
pyrex lid over boundless
now starless ozone
depleted spaces of end
times -- last hundred years of
human habitation? -- rendering
in view of coming loss
earth in ever more damaged form
ever more beautiful than before

"First cold winter twilights..." from Sleepwalker's Fate, 1992

 

Smoke pours from a fire at the Chevron Richmond Refinery, seen behind Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, 6 August 2012: photo by Eric Risberg/AP

Firefighters douse a flame at the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, California, 6 August 2012: photo by Josh Edelson/Reuters

Fire at the Chevron Refinery in Richmond as seen from Tiburon, California, 6 August 2012: photo by Eric Storey/San Francisco Chronicle
 

 
 Fire at the Chevron Richmond Refinery as seen from the Tiburon Peninsula, 6 August 2012: photo by Frank Schulenberg