SAN FERNANDO : Council Enacts Oil Pipeline Moratorium

Responding to concerns raised by a massive pipeline fire caused by last month’s earthquake, the San Fernando City Council Tuesday night enacted a 45-day moratorium on oil pipeline agreements.

Aimed at stalling a proposed crude-oil conduit that would cross beneath the city, the move puts San Fernando in step with the city of Los Angeles, which last week enacted an identical moratorium. It can also be extended until engineers submit reports on pipeline safety and investigate earthquake-triggered ruptures of the aging Four Corners Pipeline, which runs from Kern County to the South Bay and dates from the 1920s.

Oil from one of the ruptures, on Wolfskill Street in Mission Hills, ignited, seriously burning a man, destroying a house and charring 17 vehicles.

Tuesday night’s vote was aimed at a proposed Pacific Pipeline Systems Inc. pipe segment that would run beneath a railway right of way in San Fernando. The underground line would connect Emidio, about 60 miles north of Santa Clarita, to Wilmington and El Segundo, and is a key link between offshore Santa Barbara oil fields and South Bay refineries.

Pacific Pipeline supports the moratorium, and is confident that it can convince elected officials and the public that its line is safe.

“We back it because I feel they should settle any concerns they have about pipelines,” said Norman Rooney, president of Pacific Pipeline Systems Inc., a sister company of the Southern Pacific Transportation Inc. “There’s been a dramatic improvement in pipeline technology in the last 20 years, let alone the last 50 years.”

Anti-pipeline activists from Los Angeles tried to persuade the San Fernando council to enact a stronger measure and fund its own safety studies, but the council balked at the cost.

“We are a 2.5-square-mile city with limited resources and we’re trying to protect the citizens of our town,” Councilman Doude Wysbeek told members of the Los Angeles-based Coalition to Prevent the Pipeline and Pollution. “For us to (employ) an independent engineer and expend a tremendous amount of city resources on a pipeline that we don’t even know will come through at this point would be foolish.”