HUNTINGTON BEACH : Study Shows Oil Not From Fresh Source

A mysterious pool of crude oil that formed two weeks ago during the demolition of a downtown building was not a leak from a fresh oil source, according to city officials and a private engineering report released Thursday.

After studying the soil as deep as 25 feet beneath the site and finding additional traces of oil, engineers concluded that the pool was not large enough to have oozed up from an untapped oil source in the vicinity, according to a report prepared by Giles Engineering Associates Inc.

The Anaheim-based firm, however, confirmed that the black, gooey substance that formed a 5-foot-wide trough discovered July 20 was raw crude oil.

The report’s findings concluded that the oil might have formed from a years-old minor oil leak that migrated beneath the property on Main Street at Walnut Avenue, where a restaurant and surf shop are being reconstructed as part of the city’s downtown redevelopment project.

But Mark Bodenbender, the oil field inspector for the city’s Fire Department, said there is “a 99% chance” that some residual oil from an abandoned underground pipeline was the source. Although drilling within 1,000 feet of Main Street has been banned by city law since oil was discovered in Huntington Beach in the 1920s, old production lines remain beneath the city, Bodenbender said.

“In the 1940s and ‘50s, the requirements for (oil-line) abandonment were not as strict as they are today,” he said. “The oil companies always tried to remove all the oil out of the lines, of course, since that means money, but if there were any kind of depression in the line or natural low spot, oil could accumulate that they couldn’t get out.”

Decades later, a “little pinhole” might have formed in that line, he said. That, coupled with a ruptured water line that city officials said recently flooded the site and saturated the soil below, probably created the puddle of oil on the surface.

Bodenbender also rejected the possibility that an earthquake fault or other geological fissure spewed oil.

“If that was a fresh source of oil, they’d be tearing the place up right now and drilling,” he said. “In the 1950s, we tore the city in half and drilled when oil was found. If there was enough down there now, we’d be tearing down houses again and putting up drilling rigs. But that is not the case.”

Bodenbender and the Giles Engineering study also concluded that there is no evidence of methane gas beneath the site, another indicator of an active oil deposit.

Several skeptics, however, challenged the conclusions.

Downtown resident Douglas Langevin noted that the building that was demolished was originally built in 1905--about 15 years before oil was discovered in the city--and thus argues that an oil line could not be under the property.

“And if it (the abandoned pipeline) is in the middle of the street, how is it that a pool of oil appeared from under the building but not under the street? That’s impossible,” he said.

But Sheryl Caverly, who along with her husband owns the property and hired Giles to conduct the soil study, strongly backed the firm’s findings. She said she has never known of any trace of oil before the recent incident.

“There’s absolutely nothing I know of,” Caverly said. “It’s all been just a big sensationalism thing as far as I can see.”