Worker Limits Damage From Burst Oil Well : Environment: He uses his skip-loader to prevent the goo from streaming into the ocean near Seacliff.

An abandoned oil well near the ocean in the Rincon area northwest of Ventura burst Tuesday, sending a gusher of oil 60 feet into the air.

But quick thinking by an oil-field worker limited the spill to about 3,000 gallons and prevented significant environmental damage to a nearby creek and a beach, county Fire Department authorities said.

The worker, Mo Valencia, was a few hundred feet away in a skip-loader when the well blew about 2:20 p.m. near the small community of Seacliff, authorities said.

“I was up on the hill and heard it go,” Valencia said. “When a well goes, you can hear it.”

Valencia quickly emptied a load of dirt at the edge of Madranio Creek to stop the oil from oozing toward the sea. Then he drove the skip-loader over to the well, blocking the gushing oil with his machine’s giant scoop and preventing the oil from coating nearby trees.

“It keeps the oil in a steady stream on the ground so vacuum trucks can clean it up,” Valencia said.

Battalion Chief Richard Parker said Valencia’s actions prevented the oil from spilling into the creek and down a culvert under the Ventura Freeway that leads directly to the beach.

“Now we have no environmental damage at all,” he said.

Parker said gas had built up beneath the capped well and created pressure in the line, causing the well to burst. The spewing oil left a heavy gas smell in the air soon after the spill, but Parker said the fire danger had abated by about 4 p.m.

No poisonous gas remained in the air by 5 p.m., according to tests by the Fire Department, Capt. Hal Moore said.

Crews from Santa Fe Energy were expected to continue cleaning up the spill for the next two to three days, Moore said.

“It was just an old, dead well that apparently came back alive and blew out,” Moore said. “If the oil got into that drainage ditch and got to the ocean, then we would have been cleaning up the ocean, and that’s a lot harder task and a lot more expensive.”

Moore said Santa Fe had properly capped the well and could not have foreseen the incident.

“I used to work in the oil fields, and I don’t see how it could have been prevented,” he said.