The Redondo Beach City Council is demanding answers from AES in the wake of a natural gas release that caused a flood of calls, texts and emails from citizens in both Hermosa and Redondo Beach late last week.
According to staff reports, the Redondo Beach dispatch center began to light up with calls from citizens complaining of natural gas odors at locations throughout the city, including the AES power plant, around 7:45 p.m. on August 28.
The final call, indicating that alarms were going of at AES’s Redondo Generating Station, 1100 N. Harbor Dr., sent the Redondo Beach Fire Department and Division Chief Mark Winter to the power plant site. Multiple calls from dispatch to the AES facility went to voicemail, reports say.
Upon arrival, RBFD found no one at the plant’s security gate, and no response from the gate’s call box. Firefighters were preparing to force their way onto the plant’s property when a security guard opened the gate and connected Winter to a plant representative.
That representative, Amer Saeed, informed Winter that the presence of natural gas was due to the venting of a pressure release valve. Saeed then closed the valve, putting the incident to a close around 8:20 p.m. The estimated discharge, according to RBFD, lasted 39 minutes.
Eric Pendergraft, AES’s head of business development, spoke with City Manager Joe Hoefgen on Saturday, saying initially that he “did not believe it was us,” before reconnecting a few hours later, saying that a gas safety release valve had engaged “as it was designed to do for safety reasons.” A later statement, released by AES, said that the venting took place over 19 minutes.
Members of the City Council, including Mayor Steve Aspel, weren’t notified by AES that the incident had occurred — a particular sticking point with Aspel, who said that “there’s an accountability problem here — it’s irritating we weren’t notified.” He also said that AES should have “at least” informed him and District 2 councilman Bill Brand, who represents the area AES’s plant sits on.
“Their lackadaisical procedure is what’s unbelievable to me,” said Brand, who chided the plant for its “cavalier attitude about upset conditions.” Long an opponent of the power plant, Brand said that he hopes agencies such as the state energy commission “put the screws to AES for future licensing anywhere.”
“I guess if there were an explosion, I would have no confidence right now in what they’re doing over there,” he said.
“If it were an explosion, we’d be having a different conversation,” said RBFD Chief Robert Metzger, who called attention to the fact that the situation was the result of “proper functioning of a relief valve.”
“But there’s still something about the process that they didn’t expect, they weren’t able to control, and we did get calls from assistance — but not from them,” Metzger said.
The council — without District 1 councilman Jeff Ginsburg, who recused himself due to property holdings in the area — moved to send a letter to AES requesting a minute-by-minute accounting of the incident, descriptions of protocols, and explanations for AES’s safety response team. An additional amendment authorizing a letter to the Air Quality Management District, informing them specifically of the incident, was proposed by Brand and accepted by the council. Representatives from AES were not present at the meeting.
