Homes at Razed Tank Farm Also Being Leveled

It was on a small bluff here in the Santa Maria River Valley that this area’s future as a booming and affordable alternative for homebuyers on the Central Coast ran smack into its rough and tumble oil wildcatting past.

A man working in his yard 13 years ago in the neighborhood southwest of Solomon and Blosser roads noticed a shiny layer of oil in the water. That discovery led to the realization that this new neighborhood, a high-end collection of one-acre and half-acre lots with homes of 3,000-plus square feet, had been built on the site of an old Union Oil Co. tank farm torn down in 1952.

Today, years after purchasing that lot and 23 surrounding properties, Unocal is tearing down the homes and digging out the dirt -- as much as 20 feet down in some areas -- and replacing it with fresh fill.

Eventual plans call for the company to sell the lots with disclosures about the cleanup of its past tank farm, disclosures missing when the area was developed in the late 1980s.

Beverly and Edgar Strait were the last of the homeowners to settle with Unocal in 1994. They acknowledge now, as they sit in the large home they purchased just two blocks away with their $450,000 settlement, that they were never too worried about the tar-like crude they used to find while digging in their garden.

“There was no health concern for us,” Beverly Strait said. “What hurt me the most was that was our dream home. We had built it and then we had to sell it to see it just get torn down.”

As tank farms go, the one at Solomon and Blosser was tiny, with only six tanks. Unocal Corp. purchased it from Standard Oil Co. in the 1920s.

Company officials don’t have a clear explanation for what happened to the site between the tearing down of the tank farm in 1952 and the sale of the land to a developer in 1982. But all parties agree that the oil, particularly that which had collected under the tanks, was not removed.

“I don’t think we were counter to any of the regulations at that time,” said Bill Almas, Unocal’s spokesman for various cleanup projects across the Central Coast. “What we are doing now at Solomon-Blosser is entirely voluntary. We’re not under any government orders.”

The Solomon-Blosser project is the largest of the cleanup efforts started by Unocal across the Santa Maria River Valley, a region once rich in oil with 82,000 people in the city of Santa Maria and more than 20,000 in unincorporated Orcutt.

The area’s population is nearly double what it was in 1980, with new red-tile-roof housing encroaching on farmland mainly because of its prime location: one hour north of Santa Barbara, 30 minutes south of San Luis Obispo and cheaper than both.

But new homeowners know virtually nothing about the days when Union Oil dominated a region where other oil giants such as Phillips Petroleum and Standard Oil also sucked thick Santa Maria crude oil from the ground.

The town of Orcutt was named in 1904 for William Warren Orcutt, a legendary Union Oil geologist who mapped out of some of the biggest oil finds in the state. The town also was home to “Old Maud,” a famous well that produced 100 million barrels of oil in its first 100 days of operation.

Unocal is taking a more aggressive stance in Orcutt because it has lost public relations battles in the past in the Central Coast over other areas.

A prime example is Avila Beach, a popular but tiny beach town in southern San Luis Obispo County. There was a time in the 1920s when Avila Beach was the largest oil port in the world, but postwar tourists who flocked there for the funky shops, wide sandy beach and popular pier knew little of that history.

When a massive oil leak was detected under the town, Unocal was ordered to pay $16 million in government fines. The company spent what experts believe was more than an additional $100 million to buy up the waterfront businesses, tear them down and reconstruct the area. The project started in 1999, and such businesses as the popular Sea Barn swimsuit store returned last year.

Another mammoth Central Coast project for Unocal involves the cleanup of 9 million gallons of a chemical diluent that has spilled under the old oil field at Guadalupe Dunes, an environmentally sensitive area 12 miles west of Santa Maria at the mouth of the river.

Unocal has a policy against discussing the costs of its cleanup efforts.

Solomon-Blosser is only one Santa Maria River Valley project, and the company has other small projects in residential and soon-to-be residential areas.

“It’s certainly more desirable to clean up these situations before there has been development in the area,” said Almas, the Unocal spokesman. “We like to think we have learned from Avila.”

Three hundred former oil sump sites are being monitored by the company, most in the outlying agricultural areas that soon may be overrun by housing. And at four locations around Santa Maria, where there once were sumps and oil wells, individual homes have been purchased and torn down and the earth has been dug out.

Not everyone is a Unocal fan.

Carol and Dale Willey have had some go-rounds with the company over their yard at 2717 Santa Barbara Drive on the east side of town. They have found oil-rich soil and methane gas on the property; they believe both can be traced to its location near the site of an old oil well. They believe the chemicals are stunting their trees and landscaping.

Both Unocal and officials from the county health department have given the property a clean bill of health, so they acknowledge that they could probably sell it if they wanted to.

“We don’t want to sue anybody, and we don’t want to move,” Carol Willey said. “We just want to have a garden.”

City officials know that the future of Santa Maria will continue to uncover its oil past. Officials adopted stricter remediation rules in 1989, calling for all development in former oil areas to be cleaned up and cleared by the county’s fire protection services department.

“You just don’t see any oil wells here anymore,” said Marc Bierdzinski, the city’s planning division manager. “It doesn’t register in your mind. But, basically, everything in the south half of the city was within an oil-producing area.”