300 Gallons of Oil Spill From Ruptured Pipe : Granada Hills: Oozing crude from an inactive, city-owned underground conduit seeps through cracks onto a residential street.

About 300 gallons of crude oil, mixed with water and mud, oozed through cracks of a busy street in a Granada Hills residential neighborhood Tuesday morning from a rupture in an inactive Los Angeles city-owned pipeline acquired six years ago from the Mobil Oil Corp.

No injuries or damage resulted from the spill, which consisted of residue, officials said.

They said they did not know what caused the break in the line, which--like a new Mobil-owned pipeline nearby--once funneled crude oil 90 miles from wells in Kern County southward to Mobil’s refinery in Torrance.

By mid-afternoon, crews summoned by Mobil cleaned up the spill--which had stretched along the curb of a single block of Rinaldi Street between Swinton and Woodley avenues. They worked into the night and closed the rupture.

“Of course, we expect the owner to pay,” Mobil spokesman Jim Carbonetti said Tuesday, referring to the city of Los Angeles.

Bob Hayes, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Public Works, declined comment.

When Mobil responded to a call from the city Fire Department about 8 a.m., officials said, the spill’s origin was unclear.

Resident Ken Smith said that at 7:15 a.m. he had observed a puddle of oil spanning about half the width of Swinton Avenue just outside his house and telephoned Devonshire Division police.

“At first, it smelled like diesel fuel,” Smith, 45, said. “I thought a truck had an accident and drove off, but then I noticed that more oil kept appearing.”

Fire Capt. Lane Kemper said his unit summoned city street maintenance workers, who quickly piled 15,000 pounds of sand in front of a storm drain at the corner of Rinaldi Street and Woodley Avenue.

“The oil did not get into the water or sewer system,” Kemper said.

As crews steam-cleaned the street, a backhoe operator and others began the delicate, tedious task of digging up the pavement in search of the rupture. Their first probe confirmed that the break did not occur in an inactive Mobil-owned line that runs a few feet parallel to the one that did rupture.

Mobil faces criminal charges stemming from a spill in January, 1991, in Valencia--one of a series of ruptures of the brittle, leak-prone pipeline now replaced by a modern line that Carbonetti called “the safest in California.”

After that spill of nearly 75,000 gallons, the Los Angeles County district attorney charged the company with two felony counts of illegal disposal of hazardous waste and two misdemeanor counts of polluting the Santa Clara River.

Although the case was filed nearly a year ago, Mobil has not had a preliminary hearing. Proceedings have been delayed by a dispute over access to company documents.

The state attorney general’s office, meanwhile, is considering a civil damage suit against Mobil on behalf of state fish and game and water-quality agencies.

Times staff writer Myron Levin contributed to this story.