The Northern California technology company hired by the County – one condition of a lawsuit settlement – to spend the next year monitoring the air that visits and the air that lives permanently in the Inglewood Oil Field, made a presentation to a citizens oversight group last evening, and seemed to imprint a positive impression.
Members of the Community Advisory Panel, known as CAP, seated around three lengthy tables at right angles at the top of Kenny Hahn State Park, listened attentively, inquisitively and generally satisfactorily for two hours to Paul Roberts and David Vaughn of Sonoma Technology, Inc., Petaluma, in a power-point mode.
Tracking, assessing and delivering accessible reports on the invisible, mysterious air to determine short-term and long-range effects on the health and safety of the surrounding community is the most ambitious, amorphous test yet of last year’s vaunted Settlement Agreement by the County, PXP and a raft of plaintiffs.
As Sonoma’s lead scientist on this project, Mr. Roberts, a formally dressed gentleman in his 60s, tall, erect, scholarly, no-nonsense-but-available, achieved the nearly impossible.
Crowd Attention Didn’t Waver
Combining his iron grip on rudimentary but not flashy oratorical skills with a penetrating understanding of his air monitoring assignment before a critical audience, Mr. Roberts sailed through his first 30 minutes hearing barely more than a sneeze from a chorus of well-informed critics, even skeptics.
Displaying a commanding deftness, cemented by professional confidence, he mentioned occasionally at first and repeatedly later on that the County hired Sonoma Technology relatively on the cheap.
Their contract is for $250,000, which necessarily rounded corners and short-sheeted broader methods that might have been more desirable and may have increased accuracy. As questions from doubters and the plain curious expanded into a swirling beehive toward the end of the first hour, Mr. Roberts removed his suit coat, but firmly remained in charge without betraying any sign of human heat.
How to Win One Over
“I was impressed with the people who were doing the study,” CAP Chair John Kuechle, an attorney, said today. “They seemed like they really knew what they were talking about. They were a lot like Jon Pierson (County consultant on numerous projects involving the oil drilling company and the Inglewood Oil Field). “When asked questions, they answered without trying to spin them. Sometimes they knew the answers weren’t going to win them any brownie points. But they answered them, I thought, truthfully. I respected that.
“They persuaded me, not being a technical expert. They have really thought through how to do this study, given the limited resources. They are going to take a good shot at it. I share the feeling that (CAP member) Paul (Ferrazzi) and others expressed that the County was supposed to find more money and do a more expensive study. We all would be happier with that.
“But these guys,” said Mr. Kuechle, “given what their assignment is – ‘we have x dollars, and we want you to do the best you can’ – seemed quite competent.”
About the Little Pieces
The CAP Chair did, however, hold unresolved concerns.
Lark Galloway Gilliam of the Community Health Councils group asked a question about ultra-fine particles, and that seized Mr. Kuechle’s attention.
“The EPA said they need to be studied, and Mr. Roberts gave an impressive answer, saying ‘We have limited resources. It is expensive to do that, and we are not sure what we would do with the data because there are no standards yet. So we could come back with a number and say the ultra-fine particle content is point-two or point-seven or point-35. We don’t know what that means because neither the EPA nor anyone else has come up with standards as to what is acceptable or unacceptable. Doing the study doesn’t tell us much.’
“Then Lark said, ‘We are looking for the County to both tell us if we are going to die next week and as a baseline, to tell us what is there. The fact that science may not be present now to interpret the data is unfortunate. But that doesn’t mean you should not do the study. It would be incredibly useful to have the data so that when the science catches up, we know what the right level is, and whether it is a problem.’
“I think that is exactly the right analysis,” Mr. Kuechle said. “Mr. Roberts’s answer was again persuasive, ‘This is expensive to do. We had to prioritize. Even with that concern, it doesn’t get high enough on the priority list to justify not doing something else.’
“I hear that,” says Mr. Kuechle. “Based on everything else he says, I think his judgment is pretty good. That may be the right answer. Ultra-fine particles, I think, are a problem. They are becoming more interesting to scientists, and it is becoming more likely that they are going to conclude there are significant health concerns. It is very unfortunate we will not have any data about them.”
(To be continued)
