8,000-Gallon Oil Leak Fills Irrigation Ditches

A break in a decades-old pipe spewed more than 8,000 gallons of crude oil into miles of irrigation ditches south of Fillmore on Saturday morning, but emergency crews stopped the gooey flow before it reached the nearby Santa Clara River.

The oil lay in thick pools at the bottom of ditches alongside orange groves in the Bardsdale area 1 1/2 miles south of Fillmore, flowing as deep as 2 feet at some points.

Authorities feared that wildlife could wander into the muck, but state Department of Fish and Game officials reported no serious environmental damage as of Saturday afternoon.

“I haven’t seen any birds flying into it, so it doesn’t look like any wildlife has been impacted,” said Fish and Game Warden Bob Farrell.

“It looks like the spill is pretty much contained to the irrigation ditches.”

The leak in the underground pipe belonging to Torch Operating Co. occurred behind a house at the south end of Santa Paula Street, and the oil flowed beneath the property through a metal drainage pipe.

From there it entered the ditch alongside Santa Paula Street and then went into the underground irrigation systems about one-half mile north, said Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Joe Luna.

Torch maintenance planner Mike Cerino said the leak occurred about 2 a.m. Saturday but was not discovered until 8:52 a.m. by an oil-field worker making his normal rounds.

Oil company monitoring devices recorded a slight drop in pressure in the line about 2 a.m. “But it was a small drop and nothing seemed out of the ordinary,” Cerino said.

Oil company officials estimated the amount of oil that leaked from the 4-inch pipeline at more than 8,000 gallons.

The oil flowed a mile before being contained by an earthen dam erected in a ditch alongside San Cayetano Street south of Los Angeles Avenue.

Last fall, a Torch-owned pipeline in the Santa Barbara Channel sprang a leak, spilling 200 to 500 barrels of crude into the Pacific Ocean near Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County.

Five miles of coastline were contaminated, and workers retrieved at least 12 dead birds, including gulls, a murre and a least tern.

Torch spokesman John Deacon said the cleanup of that spill will end up costing the company about $2 million.

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Deacon did not know how much it will cost to clean up Saturday’s spill.

“We are focusing on containing the spill and cleaning it up as quickly as possible,” Deacon said.

The pipeline in Saturday’s incident is used to carry crude oil from four wells in Torch’s Bardsdale lease to a holding facility a mile north.

As soon as the oil field operator noticed the leak, the well sites and the pipeline were shut down, Cerino said.

Once the pipeline was closed, it took workers about an hour to find the leak.

“I got here about 9:30 this morning and just started digging,” said Joe Ortiz, a backhoe operator with M.G. Taylor Equipment.

The oil “just kept coming up everywhere,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz uncovered the pipe, and one of his colleagues discovered the source of the leak--a hole the size of a quarter on the underside of the pipe.

The pipe, which could be as much as 50 years old, had been wrapped in plastic to cut down on corrosion, Deacon said.

Torch officials recently placed the pipe on a list of those to be taken out of service.

After they stopped the flow, Torch employees bolted a metal sleeve around the broken portion of the pipe, Deacon said.

Total cost of the cleanup will not be known for some time, Deacon said, but he estimated that the job would be completed today.

“We’re hoping to be done Sunday morning,” Deacon said. “We’re bringing in lights so the guys can work overnight.”

After flushing the entire length of tainted irrigation ditches with fresh water, workers planned to steam-clean rocks and other hard surfaces, such as cement culverts, Deacon said.

The next step will be to haul off the tainted soil.

“We’ll have to be picking up most of that dirt out there,” Deacon said.

The soil can be taken to one of several sites, in either Kern County or near the Mexican border, according to members of the cleanup team, which numbered about 45.

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Spills can be costly for oil companies.

In 1993, Berry Petroleum spent more than $8 million to clean up an 84,000-gallon spill of crude into McGrath Lake near Oxnard.

The following year, officials from Berry Petroleum agreed to pay $600,000 to settle a criminal complaint that alleged they failed to notify authorities of the spill.

In 1993, Mobil Oil officials pleaded no contest to a criminal charge involving a 1991 oil leak that spilled 75,000 gallons of crude into the Santa Clara River.

That spill killed 186 birds and damaged the habitat of two endangered species.

In exchange for the plea to a misdemeanor charge of polluting a waterway, prosecutors agreed to drop three other charges.

In addition to paying the cleanup costs, Mobil agreed to contribute $200,000 to environmental projects.

For residents of the agricultural area near Bardsdale Cemetery, Saturday started out much like any other day.

“It always smells like oil up here,” said 31-year-old Dray Banks, who lives one door west of the break.

“What caught me off guard is that they brought in a sheriff’s helicopter to do a visual check, and I heard the helicopter buzzing overhead,” he said.

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He went outside and saw the goo flowing from the metal pipe at his next-door neighbor’s house into the nearby irrigation ditch.

Banks said activity at the Torch lease, which is behind his house, has increased over the last 1 1/2 years, since the company hit a large reserve of oil.

Once the oil was inside the ditch, gravity moved it north, and much of the spill was contained behind a berm erected alongside San Cayetano Street at Los Angeles Avenue.

Ten 2,400-gallon pumping trucks were dispatched to vacuum up the oil-and-water mixture from the ditch, and the tainted oil was dumped into a holding tank on another Torch lease one-half mile north of Los Angeles Avenue near Ventura Street, Cerino said.

Officials from the county’s Environmental Health Agency and the state Department of Fish and Game will remain in the Bardsdale area until the oil and tainted soil are cleaned up.

It is not yet known whether water wells in the area have been affected by the spill, and officials will continue to monitor wells in the area for oil contamination.

But Thomas Wileman, who lives on Los Angeles Avenue, said he was not concerned about oil contaminating the water he uses in his house or the surrounding orange grove.

“They kept it well contained,” said Wileman, 73.

While noting the seriousness of Saturday’s spill, Farrell praised Torch employees for moving quickly to avert a major environmental disaster.

“I think they have done quite a bit to minimize the possibility of the oil entering the Santa Clara River,” he said.

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Staff writer Hilary E. MacGregor contributed to this report.