Beach to Be Torn Up to Clean Huge Oil Spill

A San Luis Obispo County beach wilderness where many endangered or threatened species live will be bulldozed to remove a huge underground oil spill, the California Coastal Commission decided Wednesday.

The commission, meeting in Santa Monica, approved a plan by Union Oil Co. of California to dig up soil contaminated by as much as 20 million gallons of oil that leaked from its 3,000-acre Guadalupe site from the 1950s until drilling stopped in 1994.

The oil has migrated beneath the beach and other natural areas.

Commission staff acknowledged that the plan is inconsistent with the Coastal Act, the state’s blueprint to protect the shoreline. The work will damage sensitive marine habitat and the erection of large steel walls on the beach will cause shoreline erosion.

But it is the only option left.

“On balance, it’s more protective to remove the contaminate than to leave it there,” said Alison Dettmer, director of the panel’s energy and ocean resource division, after the unanimous vote.

“But it’s questionable how successful the restoration will be,” she said. That’s why the permit requires independent performance monitoring of the company’s efforts to bring back the plants and animals it destroys in the cleanup, she said.

Gonzalo Garcia, the company’s project manager, said work could begin Thursday. Unocal will use excavators, bulldozers, dredging equipment and dump trucks that hold up to 30 tons each to remove contaminated sand and replace it with cleaned earth.

The Guadalupe site is lined to the west with remote beaches that rise to rugged hillsides covered in thistle and brush and dotted with marshes where red-legged frog thrive.

To the south, the Santa Maria River and surrounding wetlands flourish with rare birds and fragile plants. Peregrine falcons and red-tail hawks comb the hills for food. It is a pristine landscape that may be forever lost, said Mark Massaria, of the Sierra Club’s coastal programs.

“No one’s happy about this,” he said, adding that he didn’t comment before the vote because “there’s not much left for us to deliberate about. They’ve already destroyed the resource. We’re left to monitor the destruction.”