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Officials say the amount of oil that leaked from an oil pipeline off the Orange County coast, fouling swathes of sand and threatening environmentally sensitive areas from Huntington Beach to San Diego County, could be lower than initially expected.
In the early days of the spill, officials warned that perhaps 126,000 gallons had flowed from a pipeline that connects the port of Long Beach to an offshore production and processing platform. That number was increased on Monday to potentially 144,000 gallons.
However, Captain Rebecca Ore, commander of the Los Angeles-Long Beach area of the US Coast Guard, said Thursday that after further assessments, officials had determined that a minimum of about 24,696 gallons, or 588 barrels , and a maximum of 131,000 gallons, or 3,134 barrels, of oil was released from the pipeline.
The estimate of 131,000 gallons is a “worst-case maximum discharge which is a volume-based planning scenario in a pipeline,” Ore said.
Officials were unable to refine that estimate, leaving another question unanswered as the mystery surrounding how the leak occurred continues to unravel.
“It’s been almost a week, and although our clean-up and emergency response are well advanced, we still don’t know how it happened, why it happened and who is ultimately responsible for it,” Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley said. .
Federal sources told The Times this week that the damage to the pipeline could best be explained by a ship’s anchor dragging on the ocean floor and snagging the pipeline.
There were several large freighters in the immediate area of the leak before the oil was spotted. A final determination of the cause of the spill can take months. Investigators are investigating whether damage to the pipeline could have occurred weeks or even months before the spill, two sources familiar with the investigation told The Times on Friday.
Coast Guard investigators examined several ships that were in the area last week and concluded that none of them were likely to be responsible for the damage, sources said. The sources spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Clean-up efforts along the coast continued to accelerate during the week.
More than 900 people walked the beaches and cleaned up oil from Sunset Beach to Huntington Beach to San Diego County. By the end of the week, officials plan to increase that number to 1,500.
Officials said they have made progress on the cleanup and hope to go even further over the weekend. But a storm that meteorologists say could bring wind gusts of up to 23 mph started moving on Friday afternoon, raising fears more oil could reach shore. Similar wind speeds are expected Monday and Tuesday, National Weather Service meteorologists in San Diego said.
Much of the crude has so far remained offshore, but streaks have been observed at Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. The beaches and water that were polluted by the spill in Orange County lie on the ancestral lands of the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples. The stretches of sand at Huntington Beach and parts of Newport Beach were the hardest hit.
Tar balls authorities suspect to have come from the oil spill also washed up in Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas and Del Mar in San Diego County over the past day. Satellite images from Friday morning’s oil spill show oil near the coast at Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and San Clemente.
Loren Sibrian found it odd that no one was swimming or walking along the shore in Huntington Beach as she made her way to the sand on Friday afternoon.
Anaheim, 37, pulled out her phone and Google searched, “Why is the beach closed? It was then that Sibrian, who described herself as “not really a press person”, learned of the spill that had tainted beaches along the Orange County coast.
“What a disappointment,” she recalls thinking. Still, she unfolded her purple blanket just behind the warning tape and lay down in the sand to read a book.
“You can still enjoy it,” she said, looking at the waves, “but not so close.”
A pollution control vessel works off the coast of Huntington Beach where an oil plume has persisted since the spill. Three other ships were tackling another slick that slowly moved south and is now off the coast of San Clemente. A fourth ship was working along the Corona del Mar coast, according to maps.
More than 5,500 gallons of crude oil were recovered offshore. About 172,500 pounds of oily debris have been collected from the shores since the spill and 13 barrels of tar balls were recovered on Thursday. Coast Guard officials deployed 14,060 feet of booms in an attempt to contain the spill.
One of the long white dams meandered across the water at Talbert Marsh on Friday morning. The clean-up crews that had overrun the 25-acre swamp over the past week were gone, but a woman in a neon yellow vest and rain boots slowly walked along the water line. She leaned down, running her fingers over a stocky ground cover plant covering the swamp. She nodded.
“Sounds good,” she said.
Crews are also surveying the coast in search of wildlife disturbed by the spill. Thursday evening, they had recovered 25 live oiled birds: seven western grebes, seven snow plovers, three sanderlings, an eared grebe, an American coot, a dogfish, a crested cormorant, a clarinet grebe, a California gull, a western seagull and a brown pelican.
Three double-crested cormorants, three Brandt’s cormorants, an American coot, a crowned night heron, a red-footed booby and a western gull have been found dead, according to the Oiled Wildlife Care Network.
It is not known how long it will take for the beaches to be cleaned and the water to reopen. Some officials estimated it could take weeks. The spill has prompted growing calls from environmentalists and some lawmakers to end offshore oil drilling in the region.
Gabriel Vargas was standing along the Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach late Friday morning, holding one end of a long banner that read “END OFFSHORE DRILLING”.
Vargas, an underwater cinematographer, said he can’t go in the water at the moment, but has spent the last few days putting together footage of the cleanup efforts. He could possibly make a short documentary about the oil spill, he said.
Her partner, Bronwyn Major, who works as a surf coach, said she hopes the spill will serve as a catalyst for change. It is high time to stop subsidizing the big oil companies and move towards clean technologies, she said.
“We are in the midst of a climate crisis,” she said. “I got it. Enough is enough.”
Along the shore, a small team of workers dressed in white hazmat suits and hard hats paced back and forth across the expanse of sand along the Pacific Coast Highway. Some took notes. A worker pointed to the backlog of freighters waiting to enter the port lined up on the horizon. Another cleaning crew – dressed in yellow vests and holding rakes and shovels – stood in a nearby parking lot waiting to be deployed. A newcomer to the crew sought advice from those around him.
“What does the oil look like?” she asked.
“Little black balls,” replied another.
“Just like tar?” “
“Exactly.”
She nodded, grabbing her rake, ready to begin. “Let’s do this,” she said.
San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer Joshua Emerson Smith contributed to this report
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