‘Contained’ Oil Spill Reaches River : Environment: Leak from a Unocal tank flows into the Santa Clara. It’s third incident to raise questions about reporting system.

An oil spill, uninvestigated for eight days after it was reported as minor, flowed into the Santa Clara River on Saturday, prompting state inspectors to converge on a Santa Paula oil field to assess damage and blame.

State officials acknowledged that they were embarrassed by their failure to move faster, but said Unocal reported March 12 that the spill had been contained without threatening nearby waterways.

The leak is the third in three months in Ventura County to raise questions about the reporting system that state officials and environmentalist watchdogs rely on to safeguard sensitive habitats.

The latest spill, a 30,000-gallon mixture of light crude oil and water, wound its way down a remote Santa Paula canyon and into the Santa Clara River after overflowing from a Unocal storage tank.

“There’s no doubt it’s in the Santa Clara River and on its way to the ocean,” said state Department of Fish and Game Lt. Chris Long, assigned to the case Saturday.

Initial reports from Fish and Game wardens said no wildlife or habitat were severely damaged as a result of the spill.

Thick globs of oil covered the edges of Adams Barranca on Saturday--seven days after the state Office of Emergency Services was told of the release. The barranca is a small tributary that merges into the Santa Clara River before moving water on to the ocean.

Investigators at the site said the state was notified by telephone of the release by Unocal executives March 12, but that information from the oil company prompted wardens to delay their investigation.

According to Long, Unocal told the state that the release was contained and had not entered any waterways. Based on that information, a local investigator “did not see it as something he had to respond to,” he said.

“If it was reported in the waterways, we would have responded (immediately),” Long said. “It’s embarrassing for all of us.”

But Dick Marshall, a field superintendent for Unocal, defended his report to state officials, saying the rain Saturday might have caused some of the oily residue to flow into the water.

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He said his interpretation of the law was that the barranca is not a waterway.

“A waterway is something like the Santa Clara River,” he said. “Not Adams Barranca.”

Long, who interviewed Unocal workers at the company’s Santa Paula facility for much of Saturday, has requested internal company documents relating to the release.

Long said that although Unocal told the state March 12 that the spill was contained, he received reports of crude oil in the barranca under the Foothill Road bridge within the past three days.

“There was no free-flowing oil, but there were signs that someone was cleaning up,” Long said. “There were booms, sheen on rocks.”

Company officials said seismic activity, apparently after the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake, had caused a substantial increase in the amount of oil that seeps naturally from century-old tunnels in Adams Canyon.

Production foreman Walker Kozer said the company maintains a series of pipes along the tunnel edges that collect the crude and transport it to nearby storage tanks. But the tanks can only hold 100 barrels--4,200 gallons--before overflowing, he said.

“I saw some oil going over the weir, and that cascaded over into a sheen,” Kozer said. “There’s no way to shut it off.”

The company replaced the 100-barrel storage tanks with 500-barrel tanks last week, Kozer said. At least two dozen workers were on site every day to clean up the oil, he said.

“We dammed it up, sopped it all up and cleaned it up,” said Kozer, who called the effort 80% complete on Saturday.

Unocal estimated that just 500 of the 30,000 gallons that flowed over the edge of the storage tank were actual crude oil. But Kozer later said that the estimate was a guess.

“It could have been 10 barrels, it could have been 15,” he said. “But it looked like about 12 to me.”

The spill was reported to county fire officials Friday evening by Ken and Joy Chapman, who own seven acres of citrus and avocado trees along the barranca.

“The response was they came out and said they didn’t see anything,” computer programmer Ken Chapman said Saturday afternoon as he watched the oily sheen travel downstream. “Now it’s been like this for the past 20 hours.”

County Fire Capt. Norm Plott said he sent a crew to investigate the Chapmans’ report moments after their phone call Friday evening. But it was too dark.

“They couldn’t see any oil in the river,” he said. “With flashlights, a sheen is a hard thing to detect.”

Plott and the county hazardous materials team, which was called out Saturday morning after the fire crew returned to reinspect the site, were called off the incident at midday and replaced by Fish and Game inspectors.

Capt. Roger Reese, who heads the local Fish and Game office, said the Unocal spill was relatively small. But it is dangerous enough to disrupt the sensitive ecosystem that inhabits the rivershed, he said.

“Any time that you have oil in water in this way, it presents a hazard,” Reese said. “It’s toxic for fish or animals that come in contact with it, and it can be taken up into the food chain, presenting hazards to creatures higher up in the food chain.”

James Greaves, an environmental biologist based in Santa Barbara, said the spill could threaten an array of ecologically sensitive species, including federally endangered birds.

“This is one of the main breeding grounds for the least Bells vireo,” said Greaves, inspecting the barranca near the Chapmans’ home Saturday.

The spill “will have an immediate effect on the vegetation, but it has the potential to severely impact other food sources,” Greaves said.

Environmental watchdogs and government officials say several recent spills have been misreported.

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In December, 84,000 gallons of thick crude oil leaked into McGrath Lake near Oxnard after a state park ranger and six other law enforcement agencies ignored early reports of the spill. Bush Oil Co. executives admitted that a pipeline leaked for three days before it was noticed.

Just last week, local prosecutors served a search warrant at a Texaco facility in Ventura, suspecting that the oil company failed to report the true extent of a 370,000-gallon release of a petroleum byproduct.

The existing reporting system “seems to allow self-monitoring and self-regulation by the polluter,” said John Buse, a staff attorney with the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara.

“Changes in the reporting (requirements) should at least be looked at, and if necessary adopted.”

Pat Baggerly of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County agreed that the laws should be reviewed.

“Self-reporting isn’t working well in all cases,” she said. “The (state) hasn’t demonstrated that it is exercising its duties as an enforcement agency.”

Unocal has failed to come clean about its spills in the past.

On Tuesday, a San Luis Obispo court ordered the company to pay $1.5 million for failing to report that up to 8.5 million gallons of a diesel-like liquid had leaked at the firm’s Guadalupe oil field.

Meanwhile, crews in Santa Barbara County worked Saturday to clean up 2,000 gallons of crude that spilled from a Mobil Oil processing facility at Elwood Beach north of Santa Barbara late Wednesday.

Mobil Oil confirmed that the spill was detected when golfers noticed oil oozing into an area near the 12th hole tee at the Sandpiper Golf Course, which is next to Mobil’s Elwood Beach facility, said Mobil spokeswoman Shauna Clarke.

Clarke said that crews worked all day Friday and most of Saturday to build holding dams on the beach, where the light crude had flowed, Clarke said.

Times correspondent Scott Hadly and Times staff writer Tracy Wilson contributed to this story.