Firm at Loss to Explain Overlooking Missing Oil : Spill: Executives explain that all rules on monitoring the crude were followed. Criminal charges may be filed if negligence is found.

Nearly a week after Ventura County’s worst oil pipeline spill in decades, Bush Oil Co. executives said Wednesday that they have no idea how workers failed to notice that tens of thousands of gallons of heavy crude were not reaching their storage tank.

Company officials said they followed all of the state requirements as far as daily monitoring and checking their equipment despite the Christmas holiday.

Those comments came as a lead investigator for the state Department of Fish and Game said criminal charges could be filed against Bush Oil executives if they are found to have acted negligently in operating or maintaining the pipeline.

Meanwhile, for the second time in two days, a disgusted resident said his early reports of the oil spill were ignored or mishandled by local public safety agencies, leading to a 24-hour delay in responding to the spill.

In addition, officials disclosed Wednesday that a pump in McGrath Lake used to send runoff irrigation water into the ocean was turned on by an unknown person after the spill, sending thousands of gallons of crude out to sea. Earlier official reports indicted that the rising lake level had triggered the pump automatically.

As of Wednesday, officials estimate that 84,000 gallons of crude oil leaked into a sensitive wildlife habitat in McGrath State Park before Bush Oil was able to shut down the pipeline Christmas morning.

At least 88 migratory and shore birds have been found dead by wildlife rescue teams, and scores have been pulled from McGrath Lake dripping with black crude since Saturday.

The death toll rises almost hourly as volunteers and experts from the International Bird Rescue and Research Center continue to search through the thick marshland.

A top regulatory official in Sacramento said oil industry standards call for operators of productive fields such as Bush’s to perform visual checks of their pumps, wells and aboveground pipes on a daily basis.

“They would be looking for anything out of the ordinary,” said Kenneth P. Henderson, an official with the state Department of Conservation’s division of oil and gas, which inspects and regulates California’s oil fields.

“It’s just common practice that that be done,” he said.

Citing reports from his staff engineer at the spill, Henderson also said sand dunes and heavy vegetation around McGrath Lake could easily have prevented oil company inspectors from seeing the lost crude.

Bush Oil officials have said since Christmas Day that they maintained a “24-hour, seven-day-a-week” watch on operations, including over the holiday weekend.

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But operations manager Ron Klarc on Wednesday could not explain the apparent oversight by his employees.

“I don’t know,” he said when asked how workers could fail to notice for 24 hours that oil was not arriving to the firm’s Colonia Unit storage tank. “We’re investigating why and how.”

The employees on duty Friday “were watching the whole field,” Klarc said.

Harvey Bryant, chief executive officer of Berry Petroleum, which is Bush Oil’s parent company, also could not explain how the pipeline spewed oil into McGrath Lake for more than a day before being shut off.

“If I knew the answer, I’d be telling you,” Bryant said Wednesday from his Taft office. “I’m not going to go around the investigation team.”

Yet Bryant said the oil company has rehabilitated much of the equipment and replaced many oil flow lines since it bought the Montalvo Lease three years ago. The company continues to drill for both oil and gas in “probably 20” wells across Harbor Boulevard, he said.

Crews working around the clock since Christmas Day have made significant headway in cleaning up the lake and beaches.

U. S. Coast Guard and state Department of Fish and Game officials, who will decide when the oil company has done enough to clean up the beaches and lake, said Wednesday that almost 50,000 gallons of oil have been recovered so far.

No one from the government or oil company would speculate Wednesday on when the cleanup would be finished. Four miles of beaches between the Santa Clara River and the Channel Islands Harbor remain closed because of thousands of tar balls that have washed ashore.

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), who toured the spill scene late Wednesday with federal officials, said he came away impressed with the cooperation among various agencies. But he said he is concerned that a similar spill could happen again.

“I’d like to have an inventory and know that they are maintained,” he said of the county’s oil pipelines. “This cross-jurisdiction also adds to the problem.”

Local officials are closely monitoring the progress of the spill and the subsequent investigation.

Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory W. Brose said he was awaiting a report from Fish and Game before deciding whether to pursue penalties against Bush Oil.

“The question that’s going to be important is whether the discharge is the result of a negligent act,” Brose said. “Maybe there’s no one individual who can be pinpointed for responsibility.”

Michael Lyons of the Regional Water Quality Control Board, which is also authorized to assess penalties for spills affecting ground-water supplies, said Wednesday that he requested a report from Bush Oil within 10 days.

“If we take an enforcement option, we can ask for cash or ask for a mitigation project,” he said. “It may be better to take the money and spend it on habitat restoration.”

Lyons said his agency is still negotiating civil penalties with Mobil Oil, which pleaded no contest earlier this year to a criminal charge relating to its 75,000-gallon spill in the Santa Clara River in 1991.

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The same thing could happen to Bush Oil, Lyons said.

“We’ll want to know why the spill occurred; then we’ll want to know what preventive measures are in place and should be in place to prevent it from happening again,” Lyons said.

Bush Oil officials have yet to excavate the ruptured pipeline to pinpoint the location of the rupture and its cause.

Meanwhile, the response of state park rangers and at least five local public safety agencies to the spill was again called into question by local residents.

On Tuesday, state park officials confirmed that a McGrath State Beach ranger failed to follow up on a Oak Park couple’s report that they spotted oil near the campground a full day before agencies responded to the spill.

On Wednesday, a Ventura electrician whose dog ambled into thick patches of oil in McGrath Lake said he also alerted authorities to the problem before 10 a.m. the day before Christmas.

But calls from Bruce Fincher, 37, to the Channel Islands Harbor Patrol and Ventura County Sheriff’s Department dispatchers were referred without response to at least three other agencies--Oxnard Police Department, California Highway Patrol and county Fire Department.

None of the five agencies sent anyone to investigate the report because of confusion over jurisdiction or failure to communicate.

The Sheriff’s Department, CHP and Fire Department all said the reported spill was in Oxnard’s jurisdiction. But Oxnard police spokesman David Keith said the Sheriff’s Department should have responded.

“Every 23 years, we have an oil spill and every 150 million years a meteorite strikes the Earth, so you do the best you can,” Keith said. “I suspect a factor in all of this is the holiday.”

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Bush Oil spokesman Raymond Hatch said Wednesday that the failure of local jurisdictions to properly investigate those early reports exacerbated the damage to McGrath Lake’s wildlife and the coastline.

“There’s absolutely no question it would have made a difference,” Hatch said.

County Assistant Fire Chief David Festerling, who could find no record of a CHP call to his department, said it will take more time to figure out exactly what went wrong.

“I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of fingers pointed by people who have risk here,” he said.

Times staff writer Daryl Kelley contributed to this story.