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Huge Oil Spill Cleanup Advances

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Covered with sage and rising as high as 90 feet, the sand dunes at the mouth of the Santa Maria River are home to bobcats, mule deer and endangered snowy plovers that nest on the beach.

But below this plethora of animal and plant life is a huge layer of refined oil moving steadily toward the sea. Used for 40 years by Unocal Corp. to thin tar-like Santa Maria crude, the refined oil is spread out under the former Guadalupe Oil Field in one of the biggest spills in U.S. history.

Unocal agreed to pay $43.8 million in penalties last year, but the most extensive phase of the dune cleanup is just beginning in this southwest corner of San Luis Obispo County. In recent weeks, various agencies, including the California Coastal Commission, have issued final permits for the project, the second massive oil cleanup by Unocal along the Central Coast.

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The company is mandated to tread lightly as it cleans out the Guadalupe field because there are 57 rare, threatened, or endangered species at the 3,000-acre site.

“We can only work in winter on the beach because of the plovers,” said Gonzalo Garcia, the environmental specialist heading the cleanup for Unocal. “And we can’t work at all at night because the California red-legged frog is nocturnal.”

The dunes are lush with vegetation. They rise like giant sentinels at the ocean’s edge, cutting off the view of the Pacific for farm workers harvesting lettuce and broccoli in nearby fields.

Three miles away, across the Santa Maria River and into Santa Barbara County, is the small farm worker town of Guadalupe.

The oil field sits at the juncture of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, an area so rich in oil that Mobil and Tosco set up fields nearby. State and federal officials are fighting over whether to allow new drilling just offshore.

The Guadalupe contamination harks back to a time nearly 50 years ago when companies did not have to worry about the finer points of environmental permits.

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“I remember when I first came out here in 1978, there were wells right on the beach, right on the high tide line,” said Barry Lane, a Unocal spokesman.

The thinning agent was pumped through 158 miles of pipe to 220 wells at the Guadalupe field. Unocal officials concede that as much as 9 million gallons of oil leaked at various spots over the years.

The spill gained public attention in the early 1990s when surfers complained about getting covered with oil in the waves at the mouth of the river.

“It’s regrettable it happened,” Garcia said. “Nine million gallons of product is significant. But the surface features of the dunes are in remarkably great shape for all of that.”

Company officials pleaded no contest six years ago to criminal charges alleging that some Unocal employees had ignored leaks for years. “My task has been to bring back a measure of credibility to Unocal,” Garcia said.

Unocal also is responsible for the large spill under Avila Beach, a resort community just south of the city of San Luis Obispo. In the past year, the downtown business district has been destroyed and excavated to clean up the spill.

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The Santa Maria crude oil pumped at the Guadalupe field was shipped from Unocal’s oil pier at Avila Beach.

“Unocal never met a beach it didn’t destroy,” said Mark Massara, a Sierra Club attorney.

Massara said Unocal officials ignored oil leaks into the ocean at Guadalupe for years while surfers and fishermen were exposed to contamination. He questioned whether the company can clean up after itself.

“Why should we trust these guys?” he said. “The wetlands and the estuary in Guadalupe will only have a chance of recovering after Unocal finally leaves”

The town of Guadalupe was established on a railroad line near the turn of the century to bring vegetables and other farm products to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Oil became an area industry later when the Sand Dune Oil Co. began exploration in 1947. Unocal purchased the field in the early 1950s when the nation needed asphalt and diesel fuel for the boom time.

“This is a farm town, not an oil town,” said John Perry, owner of the NAPA Auto Parts Store in the town of 5,500. “We had maybe two people who worked for Unocal living here all those years.”

Resident Jim Zubia recalled the days when he caught surf perch on the beach just across the estuary from the oil field.

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“Years ago, we used to dig for worms out there to use for bait and we’d find all this oil in the ground. The smell was something, but I didn’t know,” he said. “I sure don’t fish there anymore.”

Unocal officials hope to leave most of the field undisturbed during the four-year cleanup.

The settlement doesn’t pay for the cleanup, and Unocal officials say only that the additional cost “will be in the tens of millions.”

The oil field is part of the 18,000-acre Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, considered the largest uninterrupted coastal dunes complex in the western United States. It stretches for 18 miles along the coast, from Pismo Beach to Point Sal. Cecil B. DeMille used the dunes south of here in 1923 to shoot “The Ten Commandments.”

Unocal currently leases mineral rights on the contaminated field. But permits require that the company try to buy the land and then turn over management to a group such as the Nature Conservancy, which might make the area into a park.

Perry said getting public access to the field would help the neighboring town economically more than anything Unocal has done in the past. He said eco-tourists have started swarming to a nearby dunes interpretive center funded by the Unocal oil settlement.

“All the people who read these environment magazines are getting to know this place better,” Perry said. “That has to be good. If anything, we need a campground or an RV park now because there is no place for them to stay.”

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