Crew Emptying Old Oil Tank Found in Forest

For perhaps 50 years, the oil tank sat abandoned deep in Los Padres National Forest.

Two years ago, it was found by a U.S. Forest Service ranger who was patrolling the remote area. Tuesday, workers from a private contractor and the Forest Service began the formidable task of hand-emptying the tank to prevent further environmental damage.

“It’s too thick to pump,” Al Hess, an oil and gas resource specialist with the Forest Service, said of the about 1,700 gallons of crude oil in the tank. “It’s almost tar-like.”

The oil has been sitting since the 1940s, according to an estimate by a Forest Service archeologist.

A wooden roof on the tank disintegrated long ago, and the tank itself is very brittle.

Hess said there was also a slow leak, but that the oil had probably leaked less than a foot into the ground.

Ranger Greg Koons found the tank while on a hiking patrol through the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, which has been closed to the public since the mid-1960s, according to Forest Service spokesman Jim Youngson. Youngson said that companies have been drilling for oil throughout the forest since the turn of the century.

The nearby Sespe oil fields remain active. After Koons made his report, Hess said, the service went out to check on the tank. “We tried plugging the holes and covered it,” Hess said.

But because the tank was so brittle, potential repairs might have caused a full-scale spill, something the Forest Service was eager to avoid. The removal operation needed only the funding to go ahead.

Acting Resource Officer George Garcia, who has been handling the logistics, estimated that it will cost $25,000 for the contractor, San Francisco’s Ecology and Environment Inc., to remove the oil from the tank and clean it up.

The Forest Service will spend another $2,000 to $3,300 for its own personnel’s involvement, plus another $3,000 to $5,000 for helicopters, which flew equipment into the remote area and will fly out the 40 to 50 drums of oil.

“It’s pretty labor intensive,” Garcia said of the job. Hess said that the workers will use buckets to manually remove the oil from the tank and put them in 33-gallon drums. Seneca Resources, an oil company that is operating in the Sespe oil fields, will take the oil and process it for refining.

“We should be able to do this,” said Tim Alburger, environmental coordinator for Seneca. “It’s just regular crude oil. It can be processed and be turned into a usable product.”

Because of the small amount, he figures that sales of the processed oil will just offset the estimated $2,000 of cost the company will incur.

Youngson said it’s likely that the tank will eventually be removed. “But it all depends on the cost,” he said.