The plant design itself starts from unstable ground
The Corps says the facility would sit on filled ground raised about three feet above existing grade and would rely on about 15,200 steel piles roughly 90 feet long. DEQ's 401 response adds that the project also proposes overlapping soilcrete columns 60 feet deep to strengthen weak soils.
That matters because it tells you the seismic and ground-stability story is not a side note. It is embedded in the basic engineering of the project footprint.
DEQ repeatedly said seismic stability was outside its 401 lane
When commenters raised violent shaking, flare-stack height, weak soils, and levee failure, DEQ's response was not that those issues were irrelevant. It was that seismic stability of the project and of the levee system were not elements of DEQ's 401 Water Quality Certification analysis.
That is important because it is another example of the Port Westward record being split across agencies. The risk does not disappear; it just gets pushed into other decision lanes.
The public dock has its own seismic problem to solve
The Port's August 2024 update said Beaver Dock modernization was estimated at about $28 million to meet Oregon's new seismic resiliency standards for liquid fuel terminals under Senate Bill 1567. By May 2025, the Port said the full retrofit cost for the dock had climbed to more than $60 million.
That means the seismic bill is not just a private construction cost inside the refinery fence line. It is already a public-infrastructure financing problem for the Port district.
Grant money helps, but it does not erase the public burden
The Port says it secured a $2.7 million Connect Oregon grant for phase one seismic upgrades at Port Westward and would add another $1.2 million from its own capital reserve. That is real funding, but it is still nowhere close to the full dock-retrofit number the Port now says it faces.
This is one reason the Port later started talking about reinstating its property tax levy. Once the seismic cost moved from tens of millions toward more than $60 million, the project's infrastructure burden became harder to hide inside normal Port finances.
What this story does and does not claim
I am not claiming that the refinery or the dock will definitely fail in a Cascadia event, or that the current engineering approach is automatically fraudulent. Those stronger claims would require more than the public record I reviewed here.
What I am claiming is narrower and source-backed: the Port Westward seismic issue already reaches both the private refinery design and the public dock system that would help serve it, and the size of that public retrofit bill is large enough to belong in any honest discussion of the project's true cost.
