The overwhelming smell of gasoline hit me from the parking lot.
It’s a horrific smell anyway — volatile organic compounds like propane, butane, pentane, hexane, ethane, and benzene vaporize as soon as they hit open air, which is part of what makes oil an efficient fuel — but it was the dissonance between my nose and the rest of my senses that made it doubly nightmarish. My eyes saw palm trees waving in the breeze. My skin felt the sharp wind coming off the cold Pacific water. My ears heard waves breaking against the shore. It was Memorial Day weekend, and I’d just pulled up to the beach in a rental car. My brain was softened and primed by the sights and sounds of a day on the beach. But this beautiful place, Refugio State Beach, near Santa Barbara, reeked of poison. I had a headache before I reached the sand.
On May 19, 2015, a corroded underground pipeline — Line 901, owned by Plains All American Pipeline — ruptured along the Gaviota Coast in Santa Barbara County, releasing an estimated 142,800 gallons of crude oil onto one of the most ecologically sensitive stretches of the West Coast. The oil saturated the soil, flowed into a culvert crossing under Highway 101 and railroad tracks, and discharged directly into the Pacific Ocean at Refugio State Beach, injuring seagrasses, kelp, invertebrates, fish, birds, and marine mammals. I filed the above for Al Jazeera.
Federal investigators later determined the rupture was caused by external corrosion that thinned the pipe wall, and that in-line inspections conducted in 2007, 2012, and early 2015 had underestimated corrosion depths by up to 40 percent at the failure site. At trial, testimony revealed that more than 100,000 gallons of crude oil were never recovered. The spill closed beaches, shut down fisheries, and drove tar balls as far south as Los Angeles County beaches. In September 2018, a Santa Barbara County jury found Plains guilty of a felony for failing to properly maintain its pipeline, along with eight misdemeanor charges including failing to timely notify emergency responders and killing marine mammals and protected seabirds. The judge imposed the maximum fine the law allowed — $3.3 million — but expressed doubt it was large enough to deter the company in the future. A $22.3 million federal settlement followed in 2020, funding a decade-long restoration effort that is still underway today.
And yet, yesterday, March 16th, that same infrastructure started pumping oil again. According to The New York Times:
The new owner of the pipeline, Sable Offshore, announced on Monday that it had resumed oil production on Saturday at the direction of Energy Secretary Chris Wright and after Mr. Trump invoked the Defense Production Act, which the Trump administration said superseded state laws…Sable Offshore, which is based in Texas, had been trying to restart the pipeline for more than a year but hadn’t been able to secure the required permits. State and local officials have said that Sable had not sufficiently repaired damage on the pipeline that led to the 2015 spill, and the California Department of Parks and Recreation had required the company to undergo an environmental review process.
With its project stalled, Sable last year asked the Trump administration for help bypassing state regulations.