What If? : Disasters: Some say oil spill safety measures here exceed any in the world. But others might wonder how Ventura County would deal with such an accident if safeguards fail.

A cargo freighter and oil tanker collided Wednesday in the Santa Barbara Channel, spilling thousands of gallons of heavy crude into the waters off the Channel Islands and causing what officials called the worst oil - spill disaster off the Southern California coast in more than 20 years.

“Right now there’s a lot we don’t know, but it appears to have been caused by human error,” said a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Game’s oil spill prevention and response office in Sacramento.

The oil tanker Americana was broadsided at 6:42 p.m. about 13 miles off the Ventura County coast as it headed toward San Diego with a load of about one million gallons of oil.

Within hours of the impact, waves of dark crude moved toward the shores of Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands as cleanup crews and federal and state officials moved quickly to try to contain the spill. Efforts to retrieve the oil were hampered by heavy rain and ocean swells of up to 20 feet.

By early morning, hundreds of oil-soaked seals, sea lions, pelicans and shore birds lined Ventura beaches as wildlife officials and volunteers worked feverishly to save them.

One woman, her clothes soaked with the pungent crude, knelt in the blackened sand with a dead pelican in her hands. “How could this have happened?” she asked.

*

How could this have happened? For starters, it didn’t. There was no collision, no spill, no oil-soaked animals. The incident was culled straight from imagination.

But the scenario wasn’t just imagined by us.

It is one that, with certain variations, has been envisioned by many people throughout the county--perhaps even more so since the California Coastal Commission voted two weeks ago to allow Chevron to tanker up to 2.2 million gallons of crude oil a day from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles.

The proposed tanker route would send oil from Point Arguello along shipping lanes in the Santa Barbara Channel between Ventura County’s coast and the ecologically fragile Channel Islands National Park.

The decision came after a decade-long battle that had pitted Chevron against Santa Barbara County officials and environmentalists in both counties, who feared that with the increased traffic and numerous oil platforms, a disaster might be inevitable.

But the opposition didn’t end after the commission’s 7-4 vote.

“There’s been all this pound-on-tables kind of emotionalism,” said J. Lisle Reed, regional director of the Minerals Management Service in Camarillo.

“I think the concern is valid, but people have also missed a few important things. People still view this as a conventional tankering operation. But the safety measures here exceed any I know of in the world.”

Perhaps, but for many people the questions--and fear--still remain.

What, they ask, are the chances of an oil spill occurring off the Ventura County coast?

What guarantees do county residents have that Ventura won’t one day be the site of a spill such as the recent one off the Shetland Islands or the Exxon Valdez disaster a few years ago?

And if all the safeguards failed and an oil spill did occur, just how prepared would Ventura County be to deal with it?

Cleanup Strategies

It is two days after the Coastal Commission’s decision on Chevron, and Reed--a lanky man dressed this rainy afternoon in a tweed jacket and cowboy boots--is settling back in his second-floor Camarillo office.

With his arm stretched casually over the sofa, Reed appears more like a man itching to be in the saddle than the regional head of a U. S. government agency that administers the nation’s oil, natural gas and minerals programs off the Pacific outer continental shelf.

“Don’t let his looks fool you,” Dena Winham, chief of the Minerals Management Service’s office of public affairs, says later of Reed. “He could teach everyone here.”

Considering who is here this particular day, that is saying quite a bit. Downstairs, a room is packed with about 40 petroleum engineers, chemical experts and researchers involved with studying the properties of oil. All have come for an eight-hour Minerals Management Service seminar on the latest advances in oil-spill prevention and cleanup strategies.

Also attending the seminar--open to the public but so technical that only the most dedicated can be expected to last beyond the first half an hour--are a few local fishermen. For the first two hours, Reed is there too.

“Spills do occur from time to time,” Edward J. Tennyson, program manager for the Minerals Management Service office of Oil Spill Research in Virginia, tells the group. “Airplanes crash sometimes too.”

Tennyson begins by discussing the documented benefits of setting fire to oil spills, called “in situ” burning. After describing research findings on the behavior of various gases and the content of the resultant plumes of smoke, Tennyson addresses what he calls the “concern from the populace.”

“We have data now that is court defensible,” he says. The pollution levels from burning oil “are not much more than a smoggy day in L. A.”

On an overhead slide projector, he then shows the type of emissions that would result from an oil fire, including toxic particles called PAHs.

“A large oil fire would give no more toxic PAHs to a recipient close by than from eating a barbecued hamburger,” the slide states.

Much of the research going on in the United States and Canada, Tennyson says, began after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Oil researchers learned a lot from that one. On the first day of the spill, he says, oil covered an eight-square mile area. By the second day, the crude blanketed 80 square miles and didn’t stop there.

While another speaker stands to address the group on the pros and cons of using chemical dispersants in ocean water, Reed slips out of the meeting and takes a private elevator up to his office. It is important for people to know, he says, that the Minerals Management Service has made a real commitment not only to oil-spill cleanup strategies, but also to oil-spill prevention.

In essence serving as a landlord to oil companies that have been awarded leases to operate off the coast, the Minerals Management Service, Reed says, has a vigilant inspection program to ensure that all federal regulations and safety precautions are observed.

The agency’s safety record also is not to be taken lightly.

In the 22 years since the 1969 oil blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel, Reed says the California outer continental shelf has produced more than 495 million barrels of oil without a major spill.

Still, he says, many people aren’t thinking about that now. They’re thinking about the Coastal Commission’s tankering decision. And they’re wondering about how safe it is to transport oil.

And while Reed doesn’t seem worried, plenty of people are.

* According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, which cited U. S. Coast Guard statistics, 91 million gallons of oil spilled into U. S. waters between 1980 and 1986, two-thirds of it from oil tankers and barges.

* From 1980 to 1988, tankers in U. S. waters were involved in 468 groundings, 371 collisions, 97 rammings and 55 fires and explosions. The accidents resulted in 95 deaths.

* In recent years, there have been two major oil spills in or near Los Angeles Harbor, including a Huntington Beach accident in which the tanker American Trader spilled 394,000 gallons after its anchor gouged holes in the ship’s single hull.

Public concern over shipping crude by tanker wasn’t diminished either, after Reed’s own agency came out with a report two years ago on the likelihood of oil spills. That report predicted a 94% chance of a major oil spill occurring off Southern California in the next 30 years.

“That 94% horror number should be put in proper perspective,” Reed says from his office. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the tankers” that will be leaving from Santa Barbara.

Those tankers, he says, “will have double hulls. There’s radar tracking. You’ll have people observing all the traffic like air-traffic controllers. There is the requirement (for tankers) to use pilot boats in and out, and also while moored at the point where they are being loaded.

“The safeguards are unlike any other in the world.”

And what chance does he think there is of a tanker being involved in an oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel?

Reed shakes his head. “I just don’t see how it’s possible,” he says.

Computer Simulation

Richard Kilbane is a big, hulking man with a voice that resonates like an alto sax in a cave. It’s easy to imagine him working out in a Wyoming oil field, which is what he did many years ago before moving to the San Fernando Valley.

Back in Wyoming, Kilbane never imagined that one day he would be a licensed helicopter pilot and fly up and down the coast. Or that he would meet and become friends with a lot of people in the film and television industry. Or that he would get the chance to enter the industry himself and produce a documentary about a subject near to his heart.

“We’re looking at the effect an oil spill would have on the California coastline,” says Kilbane, who has been filming in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties since November. “Using a computer, we’re going to show what an oil spill off the Channel Islands would do.”

The concept isn’t completely new. In a computer-simulated Southern California oil spill, conducted by the State Lands Commission, the site of the mock Valdez-size spill was about 11 miles west of Point Conception where a real collision occurred between two cargo freighters in 1987.

Using wind and ocean currents for a typical day in May, the computer tracked the spill’s path and showed oil swamping the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary, washing ashore at Oxnard and Point Mugu and killing tens of thousands of birds.

“Personally, I don’t see how anyone can say a spill isn’t possible,” Kilbane says. “For one thing, the Channel Island waters area are known for being treacherous,” he says. “Another is, you can’t ever rule out mechanical failures and human error. They had engine failure in the Shetlands and drifted into the rocks.

“Everyone keeps talking about how radar will keep things safe, but I studied radar for aviation and I know it’s not always accurate,” he adds. “I’ve also talked with a lot of fishermen who work in the Santa Barbara Channel. They say there are close calls out there all the time.”

A 1989 report by Santa Barbara County had similar findings. Coast Guard records showed that there were six incidents over a four-year period in which large ships approached “too close” to offshore oil platforms.

Ventura author Eugene D. Wheeler knows about close calls, and direct hits. In his 1986 book, “Shipwrecks, Smugglers and Maritime Mysteries,” Wheeler chronicled the long history of accidents in the Santa Barbara Channel. In “Coastal Crude: In a Sea Of Conflict,” published in 1984, he described the long-standing controversy that resulted from oil-spill accidents and tanker collisions in the same area.

Over the phone, the names of boats that have succumbed in the Santa Barbara Channel roll off his tongue like, well, oil:

There was the 5,000-ton Greek tanker SS Ellin that ran aground in foggy weather in 1963 near Point Arguello. The 523-foot tanker Cossatot that collided mid-channel in 1968 with a 492-foot freighter. The 465-foot passenger liner Janelle that fell victim in 1970 to one of the Channel’s fierce storms. The 494-foot freighter that rammed into the side of the 564-foot ore-carrying Pac Baroness during heavy fog in 1987 near Point Conception.

“I’m sure they had radar,” Wheeler says of the Pac Baroness accident.

Accidents of the past notwithstanding, Wheeler still says he’s not particularly worried about an accident involving Chevron tankers “unless there is human error involved.” As far as he is concerned, too many precautions have been taken.

Many have come from Chevron itself.

In addition to radar stations along the channel, Chevron Public Affairs Manager G. Michael Marcy says his company has spent $50 million at Santa Barbara County’s request to upgrade and improve the Gaviota marine terminal. Further, Marcy says, shipping would be conducted only in double-hulled tankers--which provide added protection but not complete immunity against spills--and in vessels carrying no more than 250,000 barrels.

The tankers would be accompanied by “tender” vessels with fire-fighting equipment, and be loaded only after spill containment booms had been placed around the tankers.

“That isn’t done anywhere else in the world,” Marcy says.

As a condition set forth by the Coastal Commission, Chevron also would have to provide a radar-tracking system for vessels in a portion of the shipping lanes off Ventura County not already covered by other radar systems.

“I’d be the last person to say it absolutely couldn’t happen,” Wheeler says. “But it looks to me as if everyone is being pretty careful.”

Lessons From ’90

Shipping safeguards might be of small comfort to people whose memories of tanker accidents are long and whose trust of oil companies is short.

These Doubting Thomases are likely to ask: Didn’t eight major oil companies get together after the Exxon Valdez disaster and make recommendations for improved tanker safety--including designated shipping lanes, alarm systems and double-hulled vessels--and then say they still couldn’t guarantee the elimination of all risks of tanker accidents in the future?

And what about the oil spill just last week, in which a supertanker laden with 78 million gallons collided with another ship and began spilling thousands of gallons of crude off the coast of Indonesia?

For some, there will never be enough safeguards to fully put their minds at rest. The question then becomes: If a tanker accident did occur, how ready would Ventura County be to deal with it?

The short answer is, a lot more ready than in 1990, when brown waves of crude oil slogged ashore in Huntington Beach and the state of California dispatched its entire oil-spill team: two people.

After that emergency, federal and state legislation was passed that was designed to protect California’s 1,100-mile coastline from oil spills, and to ensure a quick and effective response if a spill did occur.

The Office of Oil Spill Prevention and Response was set up in Sacramento under the aegis of the state Department of Fish and Game; and petroleum industry groups formed quick-response teams up and down the coast, pooling their resources to make sure that they had all the necessary cleanup vessels, equipment and manpower that would be needed for a Valdez-size spill.

One such group is the Marine Spill Response Corp., situated in a 90,000-square-foot refurbished warehouse in Port Hueneme and expected to be operational by August. The center is in the process of being stocked with oil-containing booms, skimmers to remove oil, respirators and protective gear for cleanup workers.

A 210-foot vessel is docked at the Port of Hueneme so it has ready access to the center’s equipment, and is large enough to include space for 38 people, a helicopter landing pad and cleanup equipment. To date, external affairs manager John McLaurin says 55 full-time employees have been hired.

In the event of a major oil spill, the Marine Spill Response Corp. would work in conjunction with another quick-response group, Clean Seas in Carpinteria, formed by a consortium of oil companies in 1970 after the Santa Barbara spill. Clean Seas now maintains three major oil-spill response ships on round-the-clock alert. The vessels are equipped with booms, skimmers and on-board storage for recovered oil.

“We also have 10 additional boats that are 16 to 45 feet, two of them in the Ventura Harbor, and 16 40-foot moving vans loaded with equipment,” says Darryle Waldron, Clean Seas manager. “We feel we are the best-equipped cooperative in the United States.”

Since its inception, Clean Seas has trained 1,480 people locally in cleanup techniques, says Waldron, including about 200 local fishermen who got together and formed the Fisherman’s Oil Response Team.

“We certainly don’t have enough boats to tend 50,000 feet of boom (used to corral oil), and we’d need their support to do wildlife rescue,” Waldron says.

A mobile animal-rescue trailer also has been stationed in Carpinteria and could be hauled anywhere in the state to aid injured birds and sea mammals.

Michelle Sojka, coordinator for the Fisherman’s Oil Response Team, likened the group’s training and preparedness to volunteer firefighters. Since a fisherman’s livelihood depends on clean oceans, she says, there was no lack of interest by anyone contacted.

“When we had the Avila (Beach spill last year) I saw the training in action,” says Sojka, whose office overlooks the Channel Islands Harbor.

“I got a call at 11:30 at night, pulled up my database of boats and started calling. Every single fisherman I called said, ‘I’ll be there.’ They put food on the boat, got crew members and were at the spill site within three hours.”

So, do the folks at Clean Seas and the Marine Spill Response Corp. sit around all day with nothing to do if there’s no oil spill? Try again.

“We have exercises and training sessions going all the time,” says Waldron of Clean Seas, echoing what is done at the Port Hueneme center. “We select different sites for practice drills so we’d be ready.”

On Feb. 9, anyone flying over the Channel Islands might be surprised to see one of the islands partially encircled in coils of neon containment boom, a simulation of an oil spill that will test the crew’s ability to stop oil from reaching nearby sensitive habitats.

Which is just fine with Jack Fitzgerald, chief ranger with Channel Islands National Park.

“We have a plan about what the park would do if there were a spill and how we’d work with other agencies to mitigate problems,” Fitzgerald says.

“Fortunately, though, all we’ve had to do is think about it. There has been a lot of effort to assure nothing will happen, and also to be prepared if something did. But I think everyone knows which is best.

“Prevention is the most important.”