Thanks to frequent complaints of odious oil company violations of safety standards, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors received a report from the Planning Department in February detailing the industry’s compliance with various health and safety regulations. Not surprisingly, one oil company stood out as a chronic violator of various health, safety, and environmental regulations.
The big surprise in this compilation of oil company deviations from safe practices, was the lack of violations found in most of the other oil and gas producers in the county. In the Planning Department’s summary tables for various classes of violations for each company, there were a lot of zeros with only minimal violation numbers listed for all the other companies studied.
Based on my 30 years as a hazardous material inspector at these types of facilities in LA and Santa Barbara counties, these were amazing results! The oil business, by its very nature, is a messy affair, just as cattle feed lots are a stinky business. In my dozens of inspections of these oil facilities—both large and small, well run or disasters waiting to happen—I could always write up a dozen or so significant violations. I usually wrote up only half that many for fear of being branded a “white glove” inspector.
Whether on an oil platform off Goleta, or at a small group of wells in Cuyama, pump seals and pipes leak, spills are not reported or cleaned up, and emergency plans are years out of date or not implemented at all. I guarantee that if you go to most facilities today, there will not be accurate reporting of their gas inventory and the risk it poses, if they have even estimated these at all. This is a big deal for plants that have to implement state and federal risk management plans.
So give me a break. The Planning Department compiled inspection records for two years, at 23 oil facilities, from five agencies, and found only a handful of violations? What gives? After I complained to the board about this, a Planning Department staff member told the board that only violations that weren’t corrected within 30 days of notice were counted as violations.
Oh really? So a pipe leak, ignored for months, did not occur since the operator repaired the leak within 30 days of a written notice by an inspector? Now, this is fair because the CHP routinely tears up my speeding tickets when they subsequently observe me going the speed limit. By the way, I rarely found that all violations were corrected within 30 days of my notice.
On March 13, at the county administration building in Santa Maria, the Planning Commission may vote to approve a new massive, extreme extraction oil project by ERG Operating Company in Cat Canyon. If you value your drinking water, your air quality, and a safe climate for your grandchildren, you might want to contact your county supervisor soon. Ask them how well ERG is complying with current health, safety, environmental, and financial standards.
Larry Bishop writes from Buellton. Feel like responding? Type all of those opinions into a letter to the editor and then email it to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 7-14, 2019.