<Begin Segment 6>

SY: So what, tell me what the ethnic makeup of the city was at the time, of the Torrance, the city of Torrance. Was it very multiethnic?

GN: At that time it had about fifteen percent Asians, mainly Japanese Americans, maybe about two percent African Americans, Latino maybe about, I would say less than ten percent.

SY: Predominantly Caucasian, then.

GN: Yes.

SY: And so did that have any bearing on the race, do you think? Did you feel that being a minority, an Asian, did that present any problems?

GN: Well, in the old Torrance area there was one candidate was making the Japanese companies an issue, American Honda in particular, because I think there was a small area that Honda had taken up some properties due to their expanded facility. And so that was the only thing that really came up at that time.

SY: But it was something that, it's all, it was very industrial with Japanese companies in Torrance.

GN: Yes.

SY: Even back at that time that you were running.

GN: Yeah, because Toyota already was there and so was American Honda.

SY: And that was encouraged, I would think, by the city.

GN: Yeah, it was.

SY: I see.

GN: It provided a big economic resource for the city. Both headquarters are located there, Toyota headquarters, national headquarters, and American Honda national headquarters.

SY: So once you were elected, can you sort of characterize what the Torrance city council was? What problems did they have? Were there...

GN: Well, the usual problem had to do with development. It always pops up as an issue, especially residential development. The density is an issue. Traffic becomes an issue. Compatibility becomes an issue. And those were the usual things that we had to deal with. Some of the problems that I, we had to deal with one major one had to do with the Mobile refinery, was having a lot of fires and explosions on their facility. And so happened that on the city council I was the only one that knew anything about hydrofluoric acid, because I had college chemistry, and it's a highly toxic chemical. It's, you cannot store hydrofluoric acid in a glass. It'll eat it right through. Usually kept in a wax container. And what happened was at one of the explosions some of the hydrofluoric acid had escaped and so there was a serious public safety issue at the refinery, and turns out that they store like ten thousand gallons there. And there was a test that was done in the Nevada desert and they found that when they exposed a thousand gallons of hydrofluoric acid to the atmosphere it killed almost all living organisms within a five mile radius. And so I spoke up publically about the danger of the hydrofluoric acid and finally the city took a position and we hired a former judge who helped us guide, who helped us in guiding us as to what kind of legal measure we should take. Because a lot of the refinery operation is controlled by the county and also by the AQ&D in the state, that the local city really doesn't have the legal control over them in the way that you would with other type of businesses. So we filed a public nuisance lawsuit and Mobile had to come up with a safer method of refining crude oil. And that's the thing; they used the hydrofluoric acid as a catalyst to refine the crude oil and actually hydrofluoric acid is more efficient than using hydrofluoric, using sulfuric acid. With the sulfuric acid you end up with a waste product that you have to ship out in large volume, and so you have that extra tanker traffic that will go in and out of the refinery. And so anyway, they, as a result of the lawsuit Mobile refinery came up with a safer method of utilizing hydrofluoric acid, and it cost them several million dollars, but at least it made the area much safer as a result.

SY: Right. That's a big impact. Early environmentalist, I guess, 'cause that, that was at a time when people probably weren't as conscious as they are today.

GN: Yeah.

SY: Wow. So that must have been something that made you very proud to have been able to do something.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.