When Steve Gonzales’ boss heard about an oil spill in Santa Barbara County, he put Gonzales and his teammates on a plane from Sacramento that night. They arrived at the spill site around 10 p.m., when it was too dark to see the incident’s visual impact.
Gonzales’ first memory from that night: He asked his coworker if the spill was a big deal.
The coworker said yes.
Earlier that day, on May 19, 2015, a corroded pipeline spilled 142,800 gallons of crude oil into the ocean at Refugio State Beach. Gonzales and his team at the U.S. Department of Wildlife’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) were the first responders to the crisis.
Gonzales, a public information officer, found himself working with a communications team the next morning to deal with more than 50 media outlets from around the world, each scrambling to learn more about the California coast’s latest oil crisis. He stayed on site for the first four days of response and cleanup, which yielded slight visible progress—and now, nearly one year later, response efforts are ongoing.
Scientists and legislators are still learning the full extent of impacts from the Refugio oil spill. But for now, the Sun has gathered the past year’s most notable known effects of the spill, from political and environmental perspectives.
Policy
Kristen Monsell, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said three major bills have been enacted in response to the Refugio spill: Senate Bills 295 and 414, and Assembly Bill 864.
SB 295 requires the state fire marshal or an authorized officer or employee to annually inspect all intrastate pipelines, starting on July 1, 2017. State law previously allowed several years between pipeline inspections, which could let problems such as corrosion reach dangerous levels, as was the case for the pipeline behind the Refugio spill (Plains All American Pipeline Line 901).
SB 414 creates higher state standards for research and regulations on technology for oil spill responses. AB 864 requires the state to use the “best achievable technology” for pipeline leak detection, as well as automatic shutoff valves (which Line 901 lacked) for all intrastate pipelines.
“Our take on this legislation is that these are good steps that will hopefully prevent future disasters from occurring and improve response when they do occur,” Monsell said. “But more inspections aren’t really going to change the reality that oil and gas drilling are inherently dangerous and don’t belong in our oceans or along our coast.”
But until the state “stops authorizing this toxic practice altogether,” she said, the bills will help make the drilling operations and oil and gas transportation a little safer.
Environment
On Tuesday, May 4, OSPR released a report evaluating its response to the Refugio oil spill and declaring it an overall success, despite weaknesses in the areas of public preparedness education and volunteer management staff.
“It was well organized, the oil was removed from the beach in a quick and timely way, and partners worked well together,” OSPR Public Affairs Officer Amy Norris told the Sun.
But when Monsell saw OSPR’s report, she was surprised that it highlighted the operation’s success considering the environmental and economic harm that happened despite responders’ efforts.
“Even when we think we have the infrastructure to be able to respond to the spill, we still see devastating impacts,” she said. “We’ll likely be seeing the impacts of the oil spill for years and years to come.”
The Refugio oil spill killed 195 birds, 106 mammals (including nearly 20 dolphins and 80 sea lions), and countless sea animals, Monsell said—and those are conservative statistics.
“Scientists tell us that many animals that were killed or harmed by the spill will sink to the bottom of the sea floor and will never be recovered, or they’ll swim away and die elsewhere, so we don’t actually know what the full impacts of the spill are in terms of numbers, and we might never know,” she said.
For example, even years following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, dolphins were being found dead onshore, victims of lung diseases caused by inhaling toxic fumes from the years-gone oil spill.
Monsell said the spill’s impact on coastal habitats is even harder to quantify, though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration attempts to evaluate oil spills’ full impacts via Natural Resource Damage Assessments (NRDAs). NRDA research on the Refugio spill is ongoing and probably won’t end anytime soon, Monsell said.
For reference, she said NRDA work is still continuing on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which occurred in 1989. Long-term impacts of that spill are just surfacing, such as in a recent study that concluded the Exxon Valdez spill is still affecting the reproductive capabilities of nearby fish.
“I think Exxon Valdez is an excellent, albeit devastating, example of how significant the impacts of events like this can be,” Monsell said. “The environment there is still not fully recovered. They never fully recover.”
Staff Writer Brenna Swanston can be reached at bswanston@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 12-19, 2016.
