Teams labor hard to clean up oil spill in California
Print Edition
Cleanup teams labored yesterday for a third day to remove patches of crude petroleum that stained a California beach and fouled offshore waters from a pipeline rupture that may rank as the biggest oil spill to hit the Santa Barbara coastline in more than four decades.
Working around the clock, about 300 people on the beach were scooping up globs of oil from the sand and raking tar balls. Crews will also scrub soiled rocks and hose down contaminated areas. Nine cleanup vessels plied the ocean, six to corral the slick with booms and three others skimming oil from the surface.
Refugio State Beach and El Capitan State Beach, both popular seaside camping destinations, were to remain closed to the public through the Memorial Day holiday weekend. The area was also closed to fishing and shellfish harvesting.
Tuesday’s rupture released as much as 2,500 barrels of crude oil, five times more than the initial estimate, according to a “worst-case scenario” presented by pipeline owner Plains All American Pipeline.
It said up to a fifth of the spill had reached the ocean.
The 61-centimeter-wide pipeline, which runs underground parallel to a coastal highway west of Santa Barbara, inexplicably burst on Tuesday morning, belching crude oil down a canyon, under a culvert and onto Refugio State Beach before it flowed into the Pacific, US Coast Guard officials said.
Plains Chief Executive Officer Greg Armstrong said control-room operators detected pipeline pressure irregularities on Tuesday morning, and the line was shut off in about 30 minutes.
The company said residual oil continued to drain after the shutdown. The spill was discovered about an hour later, when people in the area noticed a petrochemical odor and alerted authorities, officials said.
By Wednesday, a 6-km stretch of beach was blackened, and an oil slick spanned more than 14km of ocean.
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