Effort to Map Old Pipelines Falls Short of Expectations

Nearly three years ago, a break in an aging, unregulated pipeline caused one of Ventura County’s worst oil spills and ignited fears that the entire region was laced with untold numbers of similar disasters-in-waiting.

The cry went out from politicians and environmentalists: Find those pipelines, safety check them and by all means, map them.

Next month, a long-awaited report on previously unregulated pipelines--born of that Christmas Day mess at McGrath Lake--is due from the state fire marshal’s office. But those who have seen a draft of the study say its scope is too small and it leaves far too many questions unanswered.

For Ventura County Planner Lou Merzario, its credibility was shattered as soon as he discovered that the very pipeline that spilled 84,000 gallons of black crude into McGrath Lake would not be part of the study.

“Pretty ironic, huh?” Merzario said. “It was kind of a shocker. We have not had very high expectations for it since then.”

A spokesman for state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria), who wrote the legislation initiating the study, said O’Connell is concerned about the study’s limitations, but stopped short of saying he was disappointed with it.

“Just looking over the draft we have been able to acquire, I can identify that we will have some serious questions to ask the fire marshal,” Gavin Payne said. “It seems to me that there aren’t a lot of lines in there.

“Our intent was to have an authoritative idea of where these things are,” he added. “If from this we don’t get an authoritative idea, I’m sure that Sen. O’Connell is going to push for more information.”

The study covers fewer than 500 miles of pipelines throughout the state. In Ventura County alone, where people have been drilling for oil since the 1880s, the consensus is that there could be thousands of miles of pipelines.

“Ventura is a spider web of pipelines,” said Virginia Gardiner Johnson, a resource ecologist with the California Department of Parks and Recreation, who served on the McGrath Lake cleanup oversight committee. “It would be one thing if they were above ground, but it’s an underground spider web. We don’t know where they all are.”

No one paid much attention to the 8-inch-wide line that lies under Harbor Boulevard until Christmas Day, 1993. That morning federal inspectors, in a helicopter on their way to an offshore oil platform, noticed a suspicious sheen in the ocean just off McGrath Beach.

Investigations eventually showed that the corroded pipeline--which dated from 1953--had been leaking for four days before it was discovered and shut down. A man walking his dog on the beach the day before had called local authorities to report the problem, but his call was ignored.

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By the time the flow was stopped and the break was located, the spill had killed many of the lake’s birds and other wildlife, including two endangered species. An open pump at the lake had sent contaminated water onto the beach and into the ocean. A seven-mile stretch of beach had to be closed for days.

Damage estimates from the spill are at $10 million and climbing. A civil lawsuit against the pipeline’s owner, Berry Petroleum, has not been settled, but attorneys said it will include penalties, cost recovery to the agencies involved in the cleanup and a restoration plan for the wildlife habitat.

Jennifer Rosenfeld, the deputy attorney general representing the state, declined to put a number on those costs, but said the restoration plan will be the largest component.

“It will be a significant cost,” Rosenfeld said. “When a cleanup occurs, the first thing everyone is concerned about is getting the oil out of there, but after that happens there are resulting injuries [to the habitat] that need to be addressed.”

In the days after the spill, debate arose over how to prevent similar situations in the future. While state regulators had jurisdiction over high-pressure lines that transport oil, no one was in charge of the lines that ran within oil fields, the low-pressure gathering lines between them or the lines that operate by gravity.

Because of its long history with the oil industry, Ventura County seems to some like a ticking environmental time bomb.

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The permit issued by Ventura County to operate oil wells near McGrath Lake dates to the 1940s, when most of the industry’s infrastructure was built. The county’s oil production years peaked in the early to mid-1950s. At that time, oil wells were pulling nearly 50 million barrels out of the ground annually, five times as much as is produced now.

A map of oil fields around the county shows they are everywhere: Ojai, Simi Valley, Santa Paula, Fillmore, Oxnard, Ventura and Camarillo. According to the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, there are 36 oil fields in operation in the county.

Pumps grind away at the earth in inland canyons, on the agricultural plain and along the environmentally delicate oceanfront and waterways. Pipelines run along and through state and local parks from the Rincon through Oxnard, parallel to the Pacific, their exact locations unidentified.

Although Ventura County used to be home to the country’s biggest oil companies, many have cut back operations and sold wells to smaller operators.

As new owners take over--there are 67 operators running wells in the county--it becomes harder to track the network of pipelines. Furthermore, the smaller companies are less likely to have the money to upgrade equipment, according to experts like Merzario.

Attorney Glen M. Reiser, who was hired by the Ventura County district attorney’s office to prosecute the criminal case against Berry Petroleum, became one of the strongest voices calling for something to be done about Ventura’s aging pipelines. He is certain that what happened at McGrath could easily happen again without stricter regulations.

“When you have unprotected pipelines in soil they will corrode,” he said. “You just don’t know where the next spill will occur.”

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In the aftermath of the McGrath disaster, Sen. O’Connell jumped into the fray and began pushing for maps and tougher regulations.

“We found that before you could even talk about regulating or controlling these things you had to know what was out there,” O’Connell’s spokesman Payne said. “To our astonishment, there wasn’t anything to tell us where these things were.”

O’Connell sponsored AB 3261, aimed at rectifying that and nipping future spills in the bud. The bill required the state fire marshal to establish a data base of all lines that operate by gravity or at low-pressure levels. Under the legislation, jurisdiction of in-field lines would be given to the state Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources.

The law went into effect Jan. 1, 1995, and the fire marshal was told to produce a report by the end of the year. Payne said that deadline was reluctantly extended under a “gentleman’s agreement” until this month, due to funding problems and the complexity of the task. He said O’Connell was frustrated by the delay.

Nancy Wolfe, a division chief with the fire marshal’s office, said the report probably won’t be ready until mid-July. Wolfe acknowledged that its scope was smaller than expected.

“The data base that we have accumulated is very small,” Wolfe said.

Merzario, the county planner, said the draft he saw does identify some beginning and end points for pipelines, but it leaves out critical information about where the lines travel, information that if permanently recorded, could stop future accidents.

“Not to say it is a total failure,” Merzario said. “There is some good information in there.”

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But the study lacks any new information about in-field pipelines like the one that caused the McGrath spill.

Someday, state officials say, that pipeline and others like it will be mapped and regulated. But that regulatory process is moving even slower than the fire marshal’s report. While O’Connell’s legislation gave a deadline to the fire marshal, the state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources had no such time pressure.

Bill Guerard, the state oil and gas supervisor, said the division is developing new regulations for the in-field lines. By the end of the summer, a final draft should be completed and ready for a three-month public comment period. But he said actual maps will take much longer to assemble, in large part because the agency will rely on the individual companies to provide the inventory information.

“It will take a couple of years to get everything together,” Guerard said.

Guerard agreed that there are thousands of pipelines in Ventura County, some of which were abandoned long ago. But he downplayed the need to create extensive maps of the area.

“That would take you from now until the end of the next century to do that,” he said. “It is not an issue where we have to have every single thing mapped. It’s not like we don’t know where they are.”

But attorney Reiser questioned that, saying even the oil companies often don’t know where their lines are. In the case of the McGrath Lake spill, the company was able to turn off the flow in the pipe as soon as it discovered the leak. Locating the source of the leak was another story, he said.

“It took them at least a few days to find the pipe,” Reiser said.

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Reiser’s response to further delays on mapping the area was a long and rather bitter laugh.

“The public has already waited 80 years for this information,” he said.

Reiser, who is convinced that a repeat of the McGrath Lake disaster is in the offing, believes pipeline maps are needed sooner rather than later.

“Obviously the sooner the location of these underground lines is known the more readily both the oil companies and the emergency response teams can respond to future problems,” Reiser said. “And there will be more problems because these lines are getting old.”