No more than a thimbleful of hydrofluoric acid killed 37-year-old Alcoa technician John L. Dorton in fewer than seven hours from the moment he inhaled the mist at the plant where he worked in Port Comfort, Texas.

It's that deadly.

Its transportation to factories and its use there imperils workers and nearby residents. Environmental, safety and advocacy groups for years have demanded that manufacturers substitute safer chemicals or processes whenever possible.

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Refinery workers and their communities pay too high a price for high octane fuel created with hydrofluoric acid. The United Steelworkers (USW) union joins groups like PIRG, Clean Water Action and Center for American Progress in demanding that refineries using hydrofluoric acid switch to sulfuric acid or another safer method to enhance octane.

Clean Water Action of Pennsylvania repeated its call for conversion to safer technologies in March after two spills occurred in one month in Eastern Pennsylvania, one forcing evacuation of 5,000 residents. Myron Arnowitt, Pennsylvania Director for Clean Water Action, said then, "It just goes to show that we need to get away from this dangerous chemical before the refinery itself or one of its trucks has an accident inside the City of Philadelphia."

"We're getting closer to a real disaster," he said.

Here's what prompted that statement:

First, on March 11 at the Sunoco refinery in South Philadelphia, release of hydrofluoric acid sent 10 workers to two hospitals for exposure to vapors.

Then, just 11 days later on March 22, a truck carrying 33,000 pounds of hydrofluoric acid to
a refinery overturned in a town north of Philadelphia called Wind Gap, causing a small spill. Because the acid is so dangerous, police and fire officials evacuated 5,000 residents for nine hours.

Two more episodes followed in quick succession:

On July 19, a fire and massive release of hydrofluoric acid at the CITGO Petroleum Corp. refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, critically injured the 34-year-old USW member. CITGO estimated that 4,000 pounds of hydrofluoric acid escaped.

Less than a month later, on Aug. 6, hydrofluoric acid escaped again, injuring two workers, critically wounding one, at the ExxonMobil refinery in Joliet, Ill.

A year earlier, in yet another incident, a hydrofluoric acid leak at the Holly refinery in West Bountiful, Utah, injured a worker and forced the evacuation of another 600 on Aug. 15, 2008.

And a year before that, in Sarnia, Ontario, just over the border not far from Detroit, a Suncor refinery accident sent oil and hydrofluoric acid into an open trench, where construction workers stood 200 feet away. Twenty-three suffered breathing problems and nausea and were treated at a hospital.

In any of these cases, this lethal chemical could easily have killed workers or members of the community.