City Gives Shell More Than Half Of Homeland Security Grant

A massive power outage in southern California yesterday, coupled with Sunday’s ten year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, only goes to remind us all how vulnerable we are, how easily the systems we take for granted can be subverted and thwarted, throwing our entire lives into chaos and disorder.

Our water supply, electric grid, food distribution chain. . . those are just some of the areas where an act of nature, or terror, could disrupt, and even dismantle, life as we have come to know it.

So it is not unreasonable to want to take extra precautions when it comes to protecting those targets that tend to stand out.

Targets like oil refineries.

Earlier this week, the City Council heard a report from Police Chief Gary Peterson about a $190,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to increase security around the refinery’s buffer zone.

Peterson explained that the city, after negotiating with Shell, will spend $90,000 on its own security improvements. Shell will receive the additional $100,000.

That’s right. Shell will take $100,000 in federal grant money allocated to the city, for upgrading security of its facility.

Now, let me acknowledge all the great work the Shell refinery has done in the city – painting the Boys and Girls Club, the library and the Veteran’s Hall for starters. Sponsoring the Martinez Education Foundation Run, and countless other events. Shell is a good corporate neighbor. They donate a lot of time and labor to various needs and causes in Martinez.

But Shell Martinez is a part of Royal Dutch Shell, a major multinational oil company, and the last I heard, oil companies are not exactly hurting, profit-wise. So why does a major oil company have to take what for them amounts to chump change from a city struggling to make ends meet, to enhance its own security?

So what, you may ask, is this money being spent on?

Apparently, according to Peterson, it’s a felony to answer that question. It’s an issue of Homeland Security.

Ok, I get it that you don’t go around advertising your security measures – you don’t leave your burglar alarm code written down for thieves to read, and you don’t advertise your security measures for the same reason.

But this seems strange, does it not? If Shell needs additional protection, one would think they have the wherewithal to fund it themselves, without the need for federal money channeled through a city that can’t even afford a Planning Manager.

Minus the ability to explain these actions, I guess we’ll all just have to assume that everything’s hunky dory, and the buffer zone enhancements will be enough to keep us safe and sound.

TODAY IN HISTORY (from Wikipedia):

1791 - Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, is named after President George Washington.

1839 - John Herschel takes the first glass plate photograph.

1850 - California is admitted as the thirty-first U.S. state.

1942 - World War II: A Japanese floatplane drops an incendiary bomb on Oregon.

1947 - First actual case of a computer bug being found: a moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University.

1956 - Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.

1965 - Hurricane Betsy makes its second landfall near New Orleans, Louisiana, leaving 76 dead and $1.42 billion ($10–12 billion in 2005 dollars) in damages, becoming the first hurricane to top $1 billion in unadjusted damages.

1971 - The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, which eventually results in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking the prison.