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Oil Pipeline Bursts, Leaves Slick on River

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TIMES STAFF WRITERS

A ruptured underground pipeline sent more than 63,000 gallons of oil oozing from beneath the driving range of the Valencia Country Club into the Santa Clara River Friday, leaving a sticky slick of black crude stretching eight miles into Ventura County.

Officials said the spill was caused by a large crack in a 21-year-old section of the pipeline that feeds out of a Mobil Oil Corp. pumping station next to the golf course east of Interstate 5 near Six Flags Magic Mountain.

“The suspected cause is exterior corrosion,” said Jim Carbonetti, a Mobil spokesman. “There was an 18-inch-long split on the side of the pipe.”

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Carbonetti said the 12-inch diameter pipeline is expected to be back in operation today.

Cleanup of the spill will take weeks, and environmental damage was still being assessed late Friday. A state Department of Fish and Game warden said damage was expected to be slight and largely restricted to plant life along the river, which is made up largely of water from a nearby treatment plant.

But the spill raised concerns of ground water contamination in Ventura County, which depends on underground basins for 67% of its water supplies.

Officials at the United Water Conservation District worried that water released from Lake Piru through the river to maintain levels in underground basins would carry the oil and its toxic components downstream. Those basins provide all or part of the water for about 300,000 people and 800 farms.

“We now have to put in ground water monitoring wells to check for hydrocarbons,” said Frederick J. Gientke, general manager at United. “We’re not going to put oil in the spreading grounds.”

Mobil officials have asked a wildlife rescue service to open a center to treat waterfowl and any other animals that become mired in the slick.

The pipeline, which ruptured at 11:30 p.m. Thursday, carries crude oil from Kern County to a Mobil refinery in Torrance. The 92-mile-long “M-70” pipeline has been the source of seven other breaks and oil spills since 1986. Mobil is seeking government approval to replace the pipeline with a high-tech system the company says will greatly decrease the chances of ruptures.

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Tim Salles, a special projects manager for Mobil, said the pumping station shut down automatically when equipment detected a pressure drop in the pipeline. Valves in the pipeline north and south of the pumping station were closed to isolate the break area.

A Mobil pipeline crew then took more than an hour to find the rupture. Company officials notified Los Angeles County fire and sheriff’s departments of the leak at 1:20 a.m. About the same time, residents began reporting the smell of natural gas in the air.

The oil coated part of the the golf course’s driving range before seeping into a drainage wash and flowing through a concrete culvert under Magic Mountain Parkway and into the river.

The oil moved for about eight miles west in the river, but the flow was stemmed by dirt dikes quickly made by firefighters and oil-absorbent booms placed across the river by Mobil crews. Tanker trucks were being used to vacuum thick pools of oil off the river’s surface.

Of the eight leaks from the Mobil pipeline in recent years, the largest were in 1988 when two ruptures three weeks apart in Sherman Oaks and Encino spilled more than 130,000 gallons of crude oil into city sewers. Mobil spent more than $3.2 million to pay for cleanup costs, property damage and fines.

Coincidently, a final environmental impact report on Mobil’s plans to replace the pipeline was released Friday by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, which is acting as the lead agency monitoring the proposal.

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The report concludes that there is a 99.8% chance of a rupture in the existing pipeline within the next five years if it is not replaced.

Mobil wants to replace about 75 miles of the pipeline, which has diameters as small as 10 inches and segments as old as 50 years. The new pipe would have a uniform 16-inch diameter with anticorrosion sealants bonded into the steel, which officials say would reduce the chances of a spill over a five-year period to 5%.

Capacity of the new pipeline would increase to 95,000 barrels per day from 63,500 barrels per day. A barrel contains 42 gallons.

Staff writers Joanna Miller and Psyche Pascual contributed to this story.

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