By James J. Devine
An explosive roar tore through California’s South Bay on Thursday night, a thunderous echo from a past I know all too well.
Reading about how the Chevron refinery in El Segundo had erupted, painting the western sky a violent orange and shaking homes, the story struck with a force that transported me instantly from here, back to a childhood bedroom more than five decades gone.
The California blast, which occurred around 9:30 p.m. in a unit critical for jet fuel production, sent a fireball into the air, a sight both terrifying and eerily familiar.
For me, the clock turned back to December 5, 1970. I was a boy of nine in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in pajamas, my feet bolted into a clumsy orthopedic contraption, when the world outside my window in the North End lit up with the same hellish glow.
That night, the Bayway refinery—the plant where both of my grandfathers had worked—had exploded. I remember the strange, childish guilt, wondering if my afternoon chemistry set experiments had somehow caused the cataclysm two miles away.
This time, the community response in California was measured, a testament to practiced drills. El Segundo officials swiftly assured residents there was no public threat and no need for evacuation.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell reported the fire was largely contained to a small section of the facility, and by Friday morning the fierce blaze had subdued, though firefighters remained on scene.
Miraculously, and echoing the 1970 incident where there were no fatalities, all Chevron personnel were accounted for, and no injuries were reported.
Yet for those who felt it, the moment was one of pure, unvarnished alarm. “I thought we got nuked or something,” said Mark Rogers, who was at a soccer game at Aviation Park.
Another resident, Ed Wolfman, was breaking the Yom Kippur fast with his family in Manhattan Beach when the blast shook his home. “We thought it was an earthquake, and we held our breath, waiting for an aftershock,” he said.
Their reactions were a mirror of the accounts from my youth, when the New York Times reported a Brooklyn resident saw the clouds over New Jersey turn red and a man in Manhattan heard a “tremendous blast” through his closed curtains.
These events are not mere history; they are a recurring feature of life in industrial landscapes.
The El Segundo refinery, a behemoth that processes 285,000 barrels of crude per day and supplies a fifth of Southern California’s vehicle fuel and 40 percent of its jet fuel, has seen this before.
A fire was extinguished there in 2022, and a 2020 inferno at a Carson refinery sent flames 100 feet into the air. They are dramatic, disruptive, and then, seemingly, forgotten.
But the consequences of this disruption ripple far. The fire broke out in the Isomax 7 unit, which converts fuel oil into jet fuel for Los Angeles International Airport.
With the refinery mostly down, the region faces potential fuel shortages and price increases, a particular vulnerability for California’s isolated energy market.
The incident also knocked offline a 600-ton-per-day carbon dioxide plant operated by Linde, threatening supplies of CO2 used in everything from food production to industrial processes.
Watching the flames from El Segundo from afar, I was pulled back to another fire in my own hometown—the catastrophic 1980 explosion at the Chemical Control Corporation toxic waste dump in Elizabeth.
I stood on the waterfront, horrified, as drums of toxins were hurled into the air by smaller blasts.
The fight against pollution has always been personal for me.
In the fifth grade, I started the Neighborhood Organization Against Pollution (NOAP). We planted a tree, distributed 500 membership cards, and joined the millions celebrating the first Earth Day, a movement that birthed the EPA and the Clean Water Act.
The fiery plumes over El Segundo will fade, just as they did over Bayway.
The investigations will conclude, the repairs will be made, and the fuel will once again flow. But the memory of these explosions—the way they shake our homes and our sense of security—lingers.
They are a stark reminder of the complex infrastructure that powers our lives and the fragile line it walks between order and chaos.
For those of us who have lived it before, the sound of the blast is not just a noise; it is a question, asking us what we have learned, and whether we are prepared to listen.