Tyler Hayden - Audubon Magazine: The Definition of Insanity: Santa Barbara's Oil Spill
On May 20, the day after the Santa Barbara spill, an oiled Brown Pelican fights for its life in the surf at Refugio State Beach. Photo: Scott London/Alamy
Here we are again. Another spill, another blackened beach. Are we destined to repeat ourselves until there’s nothing left to protect?
June 5, 2015, Santa Barbara, California — On Tuesday, May 19, a rusted pipeline broke, smothering Santa Barbara’s beaches and tides with a dense blanket of warm oil. The onshore pipe, operated by Houston-based Plains All American Pipeline, leaked more than 100,000 gallons of oil; 21,000 of those gallons poured into a drainage ditch, under a freeway, and into the Pacific. It was the worst local spill since 1969, when a Santa Barbara Channel drilling rig blowout sent a catastrophic 4.2 million gallons of crude onto area beaches and helped give rise to the modern environmental movement. And it occurred along one of the most ecologically pristine and fiercely protected places on earth. Swarming with seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, kelp forests, and migrating whales, the crystal clear, reef-filled waters of the undeveloped Gaviota Coast are one of the only places in the world where northern and southern plants and sea life meet in such a copious yet delicate display of color and movement. It’s called “The Galápagos of North America” for good reason.
Two and a half weeks later, with the oiled evidence bagged and tagged and the iridescent sheen fading from the ocean’s surface, serious questions linger—about the pace and protocol of the initial response, about what the lasting effects will be on the area’s rich intertidal ecosystem, and about what costs and responsibilities the pipeline’s owner should be made to bear.
This is not Plains All American Pipeline’s first big mishap. The company operates 17,800 miles of pipe and gathering systems across the country. Between 2004 and 2007 the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Plains to pay $3.25 million in reparations and spend $41 million updating pipelines after 10 spills dumped a combined 273,420 gallons of oil in waterways in Texas, Kansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Its Canadian division suffered three major accidents in Alberta between 2006 and 2012. And last May a ruptured Plains pipeline in Los Angeles County sent 19,000 gallons of crude through the streets of the city’s Atwater Village neighborhood. Overall, since 2006 Plains has racked up 175 safety and maintenance infractions, many due to pipe corrosion. The Santa Barbara pipeline wall had eroded to an estimated 1/16th of an inch thick when it broke. According to a Los Angeles Times analysis, the company’s incident rate per mile of pipe is more than triple the national average; among the more than 1,700 pipeline operators listed in a federal database, only four were cited for more infractions. ...
https://www.audubon.org/magazine/july-august-2015/the-definition-insanity-santa-barbaras-oil
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