Planned Route for Pipeline Is Criticized : Santa Clarita: Mayor says the path for the oil would clog traffic and drive customers from small businesses along San Fernando Road.

Santa Clarita Mayor Jo Anne Darcy said Monday night plans to route a 92-mile oil pipeline through the heart of the city would intolerably disrupt traffic and the local economy.

The proposed route through the city’s oldest business district in Newhall would clog traffic on heavily congested San Fernando Road, one of the city’s few main arteries, and drive customers from small businesses lining the roadway, Darcy said.

Darcy was one of a handful of people who questioned the safety of the proposed $88-million Mobil Oil Corp. pipeline during a sparsely attended public hearing at William S. Hart High School in Santa Clarita.

“We cannot and will not support any replacement piping through the downtown Newhall area,” Darcy said.

Doris Bradshaw, a member of a San Fernando Valley citizens’ group called Fans of the Basin, said she feared a spill from the line could enter flood-control channels and find its way to the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area.

Mobil Oil is seeking to replace a corroding and leaky pipeline that carries 63,500 barrels a day of heated crude from Lebec in Kern County to the Mobil refinery in Torrance.

A new pipeline, capable of carrying 95,000 barrels a day of oil heated to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, would be safer than the existing line because of improved monitoring systems that could detect corrosion and other troubles with the pipe, the environmental impact report said.

Darcy said the line should be re-routed through a sparsely populated area west of the Golden State Freeway as it passes through the Santa Clarita Valley. Darcy, also a field deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, said the supervisor also opposes the Newhall route.

The new pipeline would replace an aging and fragile line with a troubled history. The pipeline ruptured on Sept. 10, 1988, sending more than 130,000 gallons of thick, black crude into the Los Angeles city sewer system and Los Angeles River in Encino. Seventeen days later, another 500 gallons spilled onto North Sherman Oaks Avenue as the company tested the patched pipeline.

Mobil pleaded no contest in December to misdemeanor criminal charges of unlawfully allowing oil to be dumped into state waters and spent an estimated $3 million to clean the mess.

The current pipeline, which carries oil at pressures up to 1,300 pounds per square inch, burst again in June and poured 67,000 gallons of oil-tainted water into a concrete drainage creek in Granada Hills.

The environmental impact report, released in September, said the pipeline is certain to burst again, estimating that there is a 99.8% chance the line will rupture within five years. Conversely, there is a 10.5% chance that a new pipeline will spill in a five-year period, the report said.

A second hearing on the pipeline and its environmental impact report will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Fulton Junior High School, 7477 Kester Ave. in Van Nuys. A final hearing is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday at Culver City High School, 4401 Elenda St.