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(Recast with substance on the spill, details of the verdict)
Sept. 7 (Reuters) – A California jury on Friday found Houston-based Plains All American Pipeline guilty of alleged state water and damage to the state.
The verdict closed a chapter of the state's attempt to hold criminally responsible Plains All American for an oil spill that was the largest in more than four decades to hit the energy-rich but ecologically sensitive northeastern coast. west of Los Angeles.
The spill, related to the deaths of hundreds of marine birds and marine mammals, occurred on May 19, 2015 when an underground pipe heavily worn by corrosion broke down along the way. a coastal highway west of Santa Barbara. Beach and in the Pacific.
According to the company's own estimates, no less than 3,400 barrels of crude oil escaped into the environment at the edge of a national marine sanctuary and an undersea reserve designated by the 39 State, populated by whales, dolphins, sea lions and seabirds.
This represents the largest spill since the explosion of 100,000 barrels in 1969 in the Santa Barbara Canal, an area that is also home to nearly two dozen offshore oil rigs.
John Savrnoch, Deputy Attorney General of Santa Barbara County, said Friday's sentence is $ 1.5 million.
But that is a small fraction of the $ 150 million that Plains reported spending on spill response and cleanup costs when the criminal case was brought in 2016.
Plains was found guilty of spilling crude oil into state waters, a crime, and eight misdemeanors, including the lack of an immediate spill, Savrnoch told Reuters. The most recent convictions for offenses concerned mainly violations of the state's wildlife code resulting from the deaths of sea lions and brown pelicans in the spill.
The jury rendered not guilty verdicts on two other water pollution crimes and a wildlife crime, and blocked a second crime related to the death of dolphins.
One of Plains' employees, an environmental and regulatory compliance specialist, was originally charged, but these accusations and dozens of others against the company were dismissed prior to the trial.
In a statement released after the verdict, Plains said the result exonerated the company of "notorious misconduct" in the operation of the failing pipeline. The company maintained that its pipeline activities exceeded legal and industry standards.
The US Department of Transportation report concluded one year after the spill that many failures in Plains security measures, judgment and planning led to the disaster and worsened it.
In particular, it found that the company was at fault for not having previously protected the pipeline against corrosion and for detecting and reacting quickly to the spill once it had occurred.
Critics of the oil industry have seized the spill as an example of how the aging infrastructure of the US fossil fuel production and transportation networks poses a serious threat to the environment. (Report by Gary McWilliams in Houston and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, edited by Sandra Maler and Leslie Adler)
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