Investigators Detail Spill Allegations on Texaco : Affidavit: Officials say company tried to avoid responsibility for 370,000-gallon discharge of toxic liquid into a Ventura creek.

In a statement made public Wednesday, state investigators detailed their allegations that Texaco officials knew of a massive oil-related spill into a Ventura creek last year and covered it up to avoid responsibility.

A search warrant affidavit signed by a state Department of Fish and Game warden outlines the basis for a criminal investigation into Texaco’s handling of the 370,000-gallon discharge of highly toxic and flammable gasoline-like liquid.

“It is my opinion that Texaco has knowingly discharged a hazardous substance onto the property of another and into the water of the state,” Warden Holly Ethridge wrote in the affidavit filed Wednesday in Ventura County Superior Court.

Fish and Game Capt. Roger Reese, a principal investigator in the case, said officials have only begun analyzing hundreds of records seized during two raids last week on Texaco’s north Ventura headquarters. Investigators are hoping those records will corroborate search-warrant information that led a judge to find probable cause of criminal acts by the oil company.

“It may be weeks before we have an idea of what we have,” he said.

Texaco spokesman Phil Blackburn declined to respond to specific allegations contained in the affidavit, saying company officials have not had time to review it.

“We worked with an independent environmental consultant and government consultants throughout the process,” Blackburn said. “There was not an attempt to conceal that the (discharge) was a larger quantity than originally reported.”

In alleging that Texaco knew of and tried to conceal the spill, Ethridge in the affidavit cited the opinions of Fish and Game Lt. Reed Smith and James Rolin, a 15-year veteran of the oil industry who now investigates oil spills for the state.

“Rolin stated that . . . several factors indicated that Texaco knew it had a leak and concealed it,” Ethridge wrote in the affidavit.

Chief among those factors was the repaired four-inch Texaco pipeline that state investigators found immediately adjacent to saturated soil in School Canyon, about one mile from a residential community on Ventura Avenue.

At the time of Texaco’s report of the spill, company officials had said they had no knowledge of the pipeline or of its repair, Ethridge said.

“Without knowledge of the leak, there would have been no reason to excavate and repair the pipeline,” Ethridge wrote, citing Rolin’s opinion.

The patched pipeline had carried gasoline condensate, which is itself refined into gasoline and propane, from one Texaco refining plant to another.

Rolin stated that a 370,000-gallon spill would have shown up over time in the company’s daily “pumper’s logs” of production shipped from one plant compared with the amount received at a second facility.

“The fact that the pipe was repaired indicates that this spill was detected by such a comparison,” according to Rolin.

The repaired pipeline was discovered by Ethridge eight months after the company first reported the spill in January, 1993, as a small four-foot-by-four-foot patch of moist contaminated soil in School Canyon Creek, which drains into Ventura River.

A private consulting firm hired by Texaco estimated the spill size at 370,000 gallons but said the actual discharge is unknown.

Officials do not yet know the environmental cost of the spill. No dead or injured wildlife has been found, and investigators believe much of the toxic liquid remains in saturated soil or floating atop an underground water basin.

Investigators believe the repaired pipeline was the probable source of the spill because of its proximity to it and because chemical analysis has matched the toxic liquid with gas condensate produced at Texaco’s No. 2 plant one-half mile away. The liquid did not match gas condensate samples from abandoned lines or those of neighboring oil companies, including Shell, the document says.

Written on the repaired line was a notation stating that the pipe carried gas condensate from Texaco’s No. 2 plant to another company gas facility.

One month after the spill was reported, Texaco stopped using the repaired pipeline to transport the gas under high pressure and began using it only to capture gas vapors, the document says.

That shift, Rolin stated, was a “red flag indicating an obvious problem” with the soundness of the pipeline, the document says.

It is common practice to use a “previously failed pipeline as a vapor recovery system” because it is less stressful on the pipe, he said.

Blackburn, the Texaco spokesman, said company officials are not convinced that the Texaco repaired pipeline was the source of the spill, or that the leaked gas condensate was a Texaco product.

“We cannot be sure of what the source of the condensate is,” Blackburn said. “However, the pipe section at issue does not appear to be the source considering the low volume of condensate that flowed through that line.”

Blackburn would not comment on Ethridge’s statement in the affidavit that Frank MacCioli, Texaco’s regulatory compliance officer, misled investigators by telling them that the company had no record or maps of pipelines in the spilled area.

In fact, Texaco employee Alan Yeargan told Ethridge that such records and maps did exist. And investigators, during last week’s raids, found such records, documents show.