Civil Eats: In Southern California, Oil and Farming Don’t Mix

By: Natalie Cherot, PhD | Tags: | Comments: 0

Co-authored with Kit Stolz. How a small farm survived an oil disaster with some faith and a little help from friends.

Last November, an explosion at a water treatment plant brought disaster to an agricultural area of Southern California.

The explosion, caused by an apparently inadvertent mixing of chemicals and sewage at 3:30 a.m., blew off the back of a vacuum truck at Santa Clara Waste Water, a plant that processes oilfield waste from throughout the region. Over a thousand gallons of a caustic substance, sodium chlorite, blasted the plant’s intake yard. A few hours later, after the morning fog had burned off, the chemical caught fire, creating a cloud of potentially deadly chlorine gas that drafted over nearby farms, hospitalizing dozens, including medical personnel at the hospital tending to those whose lungs had been burned by the gas.

Education at the Abundant Table

Among those growers startled awake in the middle of the night were two women who helped run a small nearby farm. Sarah Nolan and Erynn Smith are part of a group of mostly young Episcopalians concerned about environmental justice and healthy food. Their group, the Abundant Table, makes up weekly boxes of produced for a community supported agriculture (CSA) operation, and also produces hundreds of pounds of carrots and other vegetables for schoolchildren as part of its farm education work.

To Smith, who had been sleeping a mile or so away from the wastewater plant, the explosion felt like an earthquake. It forced a one-mile evacuation around the plant, and injured the three first responders. The county sheriff declared an emergency, and the district attorney launched an investigation that led to indictments.*

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