Many Spills Not Checked, Records Show : Environment: State says it does not have staff to visit each site, and relies on companies for an accurate accounting.

The oil spill blamed on Texaco by state officials this week was one of dozens of on-land spills each year that are never inspected by the state Division of Oil and Gas, the chief agency responsible for looking into such spills.

Division records show that only one-third of on-land spills larger than 100 barrels in Ventura County were inspected in person between 1988 and September, 1993.

Smaller spills are almost never examined because division officials said they simply do not have the staff to visit every reported spill site.

The result, officials said, is a system that relies on the oil companies to provide an accurate accounting of how much oil has spilled, what caused the spill and how the oil is being recovered.

Local environmental groups said oil companies cannot be trusted to report spills. And, because on-land spills are so difficult to detect, they said government agencies should be more vigilant in inspecting them.

But Bill Guerard, the state oil and gas supervisor, said the agency cannot respond to every report of a spill because there are hundreds of incidents each year.

“We don’t have the manpower to look at every spill,” he said. “We have to prioritize our tasks.”

Guerard said the inspectors normally respond to incidents if the initial report indicates that oil has threatened an environmentally sensitive area. But in most instances, he said, the oil is contained behind walls or berms, and a visit to the oil field is not necessary.

In the case of the spill attributed to Texaco, division officials said they never even received a report of the mishap. Officials at the State Office of Emergency Services said the report was faxed to the Ventura office of the Division of Oil and Gas on Jan. 12, 1993, but inspectors in Ventura said it never arrived.

Even if they had received the report, division officials in Sacramento and Ventura said they still would not have visited the Texaco oil field because Texaco reported that the leak was minor and already contained in a 4-by-4-foot area.

Pam Morris, a spokeswoman for the division, which is an arm of the state Department of Conservation, said Thursday that the division has normally found oil companies to be reliable.

“We’ve found that 99% of the reports we get from the oil companies are accurate,” Morris said. “It’s been our experience what we hear from the companies closely resembles what we find on the site.”

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But environmentalists said they do not approve of what they called “the buddy system” between the oil industry and the agency responsible for policing spills.

“History shows we simply cannot rely on oil companies to report the spills,” said Henry Feniger, a past president of Get Oil Out, a Santa Barbara-based oil industry watchdog. “They know that it’s not in their best interest to report a spill on land because chances are that no one will notice it.”

The Texaco case is one of two recent glaring examples of spills that were not accurately reported.

On March 15, Unocal Corp. was ordered by a San Luis Obispo court to pay $1.5 million for failing to report up to 8.5 million gallons of a diesel-like liquid that spilled at the company’s Guadalupe oil field.

State investigators in that case said they have collected evidence of discharges at that site since 1978 and have accused the company of attempting to cover up the leaks.

“It’s pretty clear, based on what we’ve had occur in Santa Barbara and what has happened now in Ventura, that monitoring requirements are not what they should be,” said Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara.

“Unfortunately, government agencies are often underfunded and they therefore allow the oil industry to monitor itself,” she said. “That simply doesn’t work.”

Krop said the result of self-monitoring is a system of abuse in which many spills either go unreported or are not reported accurately.

According to division records, there were 14 on-land oil spills of 100 barrels or more in Ventura County since 1988, not including the Texaco incident or the recent spill at McGrath State Beach, which occurred on the Bush Oil field near Oxnard.

Some of those spills, including a 80,000-gallon leak at the Oxnard field of Chase Production Inc. and a 12,000-gallon leak at Texaco’s Ventura field, were never visited by division inspectors.

The three inspectors in the Ventura office of the Division of Oil and Gas spend most of their time performing annual environmental inspections of about 18,000 acres of oil fields in the county.

Division Inspector Steve Mulqueen inspected the Texaco field in September, 1993, and, according to his report, found no evidence of the 370,000-gallon spill, in spite of the fact that Texaco’s own consultants found extensive soil contamination at the spill site in August.

Ken Henderson, chief deputy for the division in Sacramento, said that because inspectors do not take soil samples, it is no surprise that the spill went unnoticed.

“There is often some oil staining on the ground, so without a soil test, a spill like that could be missed by our inspector,” Henderson said.

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Still, Guerard insists that enough is being done to prevent major spills, and oil industry officials agree.

“We spend enormous sums of money on prevention,” Shell Oil Co. spokeswoman Susan Hershberger said in an interview earlier this year. “We have all kinds of procedures set up to respond to spills, and we are firm about dealing with spills immediately.”

But local environmental groups argue that, as evidenced by recent events, the power to police the oil industry may be safer in independent hands.

“If the oil companies can afford to self-monitor, they should be able to help pay for agencies like (the Division of Oil and Gas) to do the job independently,” Krop said. “I think it’s clear that if things stay the same, we’re just inviting more abuse.”