Oil From Ruptured Line Closes Busy Ventura Blvd.

At least 60,000 gallons of crude oil from a ruptured underground line oozed into a busy Encino neighborhood and the Los Angeles River for four hours Saturday, forcing the closure of a half-mile stretch of Ventura Boulevard, the busiest thoroughfare in the San Fernando Valley, and angering merchants and motorists.

Crews were expected to work all night to repair the leak in a Mobil Oil Co. underground line at Ventura Boulevard and Woodley Avenue. Officials said a stretch of Ventura Boulevard between Gloria and Libbit avenues was expected to be closed to traffic until early today.

The Haskell Avenue off-ramps on the Ventura Freeway were closed all day Saturday.

Smelly oil from the leak had flowed down gutters along busy Ventura Boulevard, a heavily traveled avenue of shops and office buildings, and into an adjacent residential neighborhood, officials said. The oil also traveled through storm drains into the Los Angeles River, and, although barriers were set up, poured down the river to the Pasadena Freeway, they said.

The oil reached the Los Angeles-Glendale sewage treatment plant east of the Golden State Freeway in Glendale and floated on top of some of the plant’s tanks, said Harry Sizemore, assistant director of the city’s Bureau of Sanitation. The plant was shut down and the overflow sewage was transported to the Hyperion treatment plant in Playa del Rey, he said.

No one was evacuated as a result of the spill, and no fires or injuries were reported, officials said. Los Angeles County hazardous material specialists said the spill did not pose a health danger to those who breathed the fumes.

Mobil Oil officials said they did not immediately know the cause of the rupture but speculated it could have been a corroded line.

James A. Carbonetti, a spokesman for Mobil, said oil started bubbling through a crack in the pavement in the intersection. A Mobil worker monitoring lines at the company’s Torrance headquarters noticed a drop in pressure in the line at 4:08 a.m. and shut it down.

The break was in a 180-mile line carrying crude oil from the Bellridge area northeast of Bakersfield to the company’s Torrance refinery.

‘Started Coming Up’

After the line was shut down four minutes after the pressure drop was noticed, the oil caught between pumping stations in the Sepulveda Basin and the Mulholland Drive tunnel began flowing out of the crack, Carbonetti said. “The oil came down the hill and started coming up,” he said.

The oil stopped flowing around 8 a.m., officials said.

Mobil crews, assisted by other cleanup firms, bored a hole in the middle of the intersection to reach the line and patch it, Carbonetti said. He said he was not sure how much the repair and cleanup will cost.

Thousands of motorists traveling down Ventura in Encino were detoured through narrow residential streets all day Saturday and into the night.

Some merchants along the affected stretch were angry because customers could not get to their stores.

“I have a whole bunch of flowers I ordered for Rosh Hashanah, and now I can’t sell any of them,” said Lillian Stark, manager of Bloomingdale’s Flowers. “This would have been a big day for flowers, and I’m going to lose money. If I had known this was going to happen, I would not have ordered these flowers.”