Cleanup Of Oil-Fouled California Beach Could Take Months

[Purveyor]

Source: Reuters

US | Thu May 21, 2015 9:32pm EDT

The U.S. Coast Guard captain overseeing cleanup of oil spilled from a pipeline rupture that closed two California state beaches and fouled offshore waters near Santa Barbara said on Thursday it may take months to restore the area to its natural condition.

Up to 2,500 barrels (105,000 gallons) of crude petroleum, according to latest estimates, gushed onto San Refugio State Beach and into the Pacific about 20 miles (32 km) west of Santa Barbara on Tuesday when an underground pipeline that runs along the coastal highway burst.

As much as a fifth of the amount was believed to have reached the ocean, leaving oil slicks that stretched for more than 9 miles (15 km) along the coast.

Environmental activists and local officials said it could turn out to be the largest oil spill in 46 years to hit the ecologically sensitive but energy-rich Santa Barbara shoreline, about 125 miles (200 km) northwest of Los Angeles.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/22/us-usa-california-oilspill-idUSKBN0O52MY20150522

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Years is more like it. You can never get it all in months...

[upaloopa]

1. We carry cotton balls and baby oil to clean

the tar balls off our feet when we walk along Santa Barbara beaches.
That is just the oil that comes up naturally from the sea floor.
This spill will leave oil in the sand for years as you say.

[Hekate]

2. Rachel Maddow gave a huge shout-out to theSanta Barbara Independent tonight....

They're doing an excellent job on news coverage of this emergency.

SB News Press is useless, so a lot of folks refuse to subscribe, including me. Worse is the way the local broadcast affiliates handled it at first. FOX bought up the stations that carry ABC and CBS several years ago and promised that local news would be covered better than ever by their "team." Well, we had a good sample of that at 5:00 last evening as they combined their in-depth coverage and paraded the pro-business/pro-oil troops in front of the camera to tell us how important oil is to our way of life and that unfortunate accidents just happen. The last straw was a guy named Andy Caldwell...I'll explain about him later if I can stop sputtering long enough.

So I changed channels to NBC, and lo and behold they were doing quite well. From them I learned the following salient facts: the company has racked up about 180 serious violations across the country in recent years, and when they came to SB County they filed a lawsuit the result of which is they are the only oil company whose operations are not in some measure monitored by the county, but instead by a state agency (Fire Marshall? I'd never heard of them at all vis a vis oil companies).