Coastal Restoration

We have been getting lots of inquires about this crazy tarballing going on across Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles Counties.  I thought I would give a quick overview of tar balls in our part...

We certainly had fresh tar and more weathered tar balls across lots of this beach.  It is tough to tell if this is simply tar seeps or if this is from our Refugio spill.  CDFW monitoring teams were on site as we began surveying and we had a quick powwow with them.  They took samples to fingerprint the oil, but felt it unlikely to be pipeline crude.  I’m not so sure.  It certainly seemed to be more than my recollection of the background levels at this site.  The freshness of some patches and concentration near the waterline and the ubiquitousness of it (see Alex’s foot below) make me think this may well be pipeline crude.  It is important to note that Goleta Beach (where our first team sampled this morning) was tar/oil free.  Stay tuned.  Back to work.

The operator of an underground pipeline that ruptured and released up to 105,000 gallons of crude oil in Santa Barbara County -- and tens of thousands of gallons into the ocean -- said Wednesday that the spill happened after a series of mechanical problems caused the line to be shut down.

Holy cow!  It has been a crazy day.  One of our teams sampling Haskell’s Beach (near the Bacara Resort) north Coal Oil Point was basically given the boot.  Various clean-up teams are now sweeping the beaches from El Capitan to Goleta and the Incident Command has now shut down public access to all of those beaches. This is a huge expansion of the closure area and seems to confirm our concerns beginning mid last week that much of the oil arriving to b

Plains Pipeline, the large Texas-based company responsible for the pipe that ruptured in Santa Barbara County, has accumulated 175 safety and maintenance infractions since 2006, according to federal records.

Emergency officials were responding Tuesday afternoon to a ruptured pipeline that was leaking several barrels of crude oil into the ocean off the Santa Barbara County coast, authorities said.