Coastal Restoration

The media and public are apparently getting more and more worried about marine mammals and birds fouled or killed by oil spilled from the May 19 pipeline break.  At least part of this current worry...

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

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.

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...

Sandy Beaches are everything to us here in Southern California, a central pillar of both our cultural identity and economic engine.  They are where we birthed surf culture (on beaches like Huntington and Surfrider), invented beach volleyball (on beaches like Manhattan Beach and Redondo), trained our young people to fight the axis powers of WWII (on beaches across Coronado Island and Mugu Lagoon), have filmed our entertainment for a century (on beaches like Leo Carrillo and Will Rogers), see the manifestation of climate change/sea level most clearly (at Ventura’s Surfer’s Point Beach), pump ourselves up to become the next action movie star or guvernator (this really only ever happens on Venice…check out the Jim’s killer glass if you go), stare over the tops of our sunglasses at scantily clad people (on any beach you can think of this holiday weekend) and first learned how devastating an oil spill can really be (on beaches across Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties in 1969.

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.