One of many signs posted for beach goers on the beach at Crystal Cove State Park in Laguna Beach on Thursday, October 14, 2021, as cleanup crews pick up tar balls that have washed ashore, remnants of the offshore oil spill near Huntington Beach in early October.
(Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Three safety-related improvements generated from the 2021 oil spill off the coast of Orange County soon could become operating procedures:
First, the minimum distance between a commercial ship’s anchor and any oil pipeline operating in the San Pedro Bay, including off the coast of Orange County and Long Beach, should be expanded. The current minimum is 500 feet and the suggested new distance is expected to be 1,500 feet.
Second, underwater alarm systems connected to oil pipelines could be beefed up so that they can better alert marine-traffic controllers when a ship anchor drops nearby, and similar improvements could be made nationally.
Third, oil operators should be urged to always follow protocols for training and for employee drug testing after a spill or rupture is discovered.
The National Transportation Safety Board first said it planned to seek those improvements in a preliminary report on the spill released in early December. And all three ideas made it into that report’s final draft, which was made public Thursday, Jan. 25.
The NTSB’s findings offer something of a last word on the Oct. 1, 2021 spill that put a relatively small amount of oil (about 588 barrels, or 25,000 gallons) into the ocean, yet still managed to cause significant damage to one of the nation’s most popular and profitable stretches of coast. Oil that leaked out of an underwater oil pipeline, broken at a point roughly 4.75 miles off the coast of Huntington Beach, killed fish and other marine life, fouled local wetlands and closed commercial fishing and beaches from Orange County to as far south as San Diego.
The spill sparked national news about oil off the Orange County coast, damaging the region’s reputation. It also canceled the last day of the 2021 edition of the Pacific Air Show in Huntington Beach, a huge money-maker for the city and local businesses.
It also sparked lawmakers, in Sacramento and Washington D.C., to propose different ways to end or limit oil exploration off the Southern California coast – ideas that, so far, have not come to pass. Critics in the aftermath of the spill noted that drilling in San Pedro Bay produces a tiny sliver of the oil used nationally each year, while a clean ocean generates about $44 billion a year in private and public revenue for local governments and businesses, in addition to boosting real estate values throughout the region.
The NTSB’s final report on the spill confirmed several facts that have previously been settled in court or confirmed in other investigations.
For instance, the NTSB report describes the spill as the result of events that took place about nine months earlier, during a storm off the coast of Southern California on Jan. 25, 2021 – three years to the day before the release of the report.
During that storm, two container ships, the Beiijing and the MSC Danit, dropped anchors near the pipeline. When the rough weather (which the NTSB report described as “high winds and seas generated by a strong cold front,”) prompted the anchors to shift, the 40-year-old pipeline was dragged along the ocean floor and bent like a huge straw, weakening the metal to the point that it ruptured on Oct. 1, 2021.
Critically, the NTSB investigators said neither the pipeline’s owner, Amplify Energy, nor local marine-traffic control operators (an agency called Vessel Traffic Service Los Angeles-Long Beach) were told about the shifting anchors or the bent pipeline.
Investigators described that lack of communication as an indirect cause of the spill.
“Had the pipeline operator been made aware of the Beijing and MSC Danit anchor dragging, the company could have conducted an underwater survey of the pipeline, identified the damage, and made repairs, preventing the eventual release of crude oil.”
The NTSB investigators also said the spill was as damaging as it was, in part, because of poor response by the pipeline operators.
Though workers first heard alarms about a possible rupture around 4:10 p.m. on Oct. 1, they spent the next 13 hours stopping and restarting the pipeline while troubleshooting what they believed to be possibly faulty alarms. They turned off the pipeline for a final time a little after 6 a.m. on the morning of Oct. 2. And about two hours after that, after a contractor vessel offered visual confirmation of the spill, they notified state authorities, a move required by law.
Those delays exacerbated…
Read More: Federal regulators offer final word on oil spill off coast of Huntington Beach –