Ruptured Gasoline Pipeline Forces Evacuation of 1,500

A 10-inch gasoline pipeline burst Saturday near the Marine Corps Helicopter Air Station in Tustin, forcing the evacuation of 1,500 people from military housing, the rerouting of Amtrak train traffic and the closure of surrounding streets.

At its peak, the underground pipeline was spewing 1,000 gallons per minute into an adjacent flood control channel. But a spokeswoman for the Orange County Fire Department said the channel was dammed quickly, preventing the gasoline from fouling San Diego Creek and Upper Newport Bay, an ecological reserve.

There was no fire. Six firefighters were treated for “respiratory irritation” due to inhaling fumes, the spokeswoman said.

The pipeline company guessed that 20,000 gallons of premium unleaded automotive fuel were spilled into the flood control channel, which traverses the Marine Corps base. The Fire Department spokeswoman said only that a “very substantial” amount had been spilled.

“We were real lucky it was in the channel,” said Fire Department spokeswoman Patti Range. “We’d have been in real trouble if it had hit the streets or a housing tract or something like that.”

Even so, she said, the rupture “was flowing pretty good,” and “any spark could have set it off.”

The break was in a pipeline beside Moulton Parkway east of Red Hill Avenue. The pipeline, owned by San Diego Pipe Line Co., carries more than 90% of the gasoline transported to San Diego County, said Tom Buckley, a company spokesman.

He said the pipeline would be patched and functioning by this morning. “It will have no impact on gasoline available in San Diego,” he said. “There is no inventory shortage. They have a stockpile for two to three days minimum.”

But the pipeline break had a great impact on the Santa Fe Railway mainline, which runs beside the pipeline and is owned by the same parent company, Santa Fe Southern Pacific Corp.

The concentration of volatile gasoline fumes prompted fire officials to halt train traffic for fear that a spark from train wheels would set off an explosion.

Amtrak passenger trains en route when the leak was reported at 12:37 p.m. were stopped at Santa Ana and San Juan Capistrano and their passengers bused to their destinations. Five trains due to depart from Los Angeles and San Diego were canceled and passengers were offered bus transportation instead.

The track was reopened at 6:38 p.m., and the two night trains from Los Angeles and San Diego were expected to depart on schedule, an Amtrak spokeswoman said.

No freight train traffic was affected, Buckley said.

Fumes from the channel wafted toward noncommissioned officer housing at the north and east edges of the Marine Corps base, and an estimated 1,500 Marines and their families were ordered from there to the base officers clubs and recreation hall.

Fire Department Capt. Lou Furst said the evacuees would spend the night away from their homes. He said a fog was descending on the area, which was interfering with the dissipation of the gasoline fumes. Foam was being spread over the gasoline in the channel to hold down the fumes, he said.

What fire officials described as a “very, very few” civilians were asked to close down and leave a small commercial area adjacent to the flood control channel.

Officers from the Tustin and Irvine Police departments and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department closed streets in a six-square-mile area bounded by Moulton Parkway and Harvard, Alton and Red Hill avenues.

Officials from the Orange County Health Care Agency and Environmental Management Agency, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Red Cross were also on the scene.

Buckley said the cause of the pipeline rupture was not yet known. He said such a break “is somewhat unusual, but it does happen.”

He said the flow from the rupture was stopped in 20 minutes. The estimated amount of spilled gasoline is roughly equivalent to the capacity of a truck-and-trailer tanker combination, he said.

Range said that once an accurate estimate of the amount of spilled gasoline was calculated, trucks would be summoned to vacuum the gasoline out of the channel and carry it away. She said the cleanup was expected to last through the night.