The Coast Guard said that the miles-long slick of oil off the Goleta coast is the fruit of a natural seep.
The slick, some 3 miles long, was first spotted the morning of July 29. Firefighters responding to reports of a gasoline smell at the Goleta Pier found two kayakers, whose legs and boats were sticky with oil.
Members of the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Detachment mobilized that day, said Petty Officer 1st Class Sondra-Kay Kneen. Working with Santa Barbara County Fire and local organizations such as Santa Barbara Channelkeeper, they collected tar ball samples from the slick.
Those tar balls were then loaded onto a plane and flown out to a lab at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut. At the lab, Kneen said, scientists tested the molecular fingerprint of the samples against Goleta tar on file.
The lab, she said, called back at about 8 a.m. on Aug. 3 to confirm that it was a natural seep—a normal occurrence in the Santa Barbara Channel, which belches up oil and methane from the seafloor on a regular basis.
The Coast Guard worked with Venoco, which operates a nearby oil rig. “The samples did not match to materials that came from Platform Holly,” Kneen said.
A spokesperson for Venoco could not be reached as of press time. The Associated Press reported that the pipeline linking Holly to an onshore pump station is currently drained of oil and full of seawater.
Venoco can’t transport crude oil in Santa Barbara County right now—onshore pipelines remain shut down in the wake of the Line 901 disaster and the county has denied Venoco’s requests for an emergency permit to transport oil by truck.
Kneen couldn’t say how often the Coast Guard responds to oil slicks, saying that they did so on a case-by-case basis. “We’ve had airplanes call us and say we’ve seen a sheen from 10,000 feet above,” she told the Sun.
If civilians see an oil slick, Kneen said, call the Coast Guard and leave it to them.
“If they do see a sheen, report it and stay away. Don’t get in it, don’t take samples,” she said.
This article appears in Aug 6-13, 2015.
