Soon ExxonMobil may receive permission from Santa Barbara County to truck oil from its Gaviota facility, up highways 101 and 166 to refineries in Kern County—280,000 to 560,000 gallons of oil per day in 70 trucks, 140 round trips, will pass through my town, Buellton, as well as Los Alamos, Orcutt, Santa Maria, and Cuyama to feed a dying oil industry.
Why is this new polluting and accident-prone scheme occurring? The 2015 Refugio Beach oil spill revealed that Plains All American Pipeline, including their partners ExxonMobil and others, allowed a substandard pipeline to deteriorate for 30 years, causing 21,000 gallons of oil to spill onto state park beaches and into the ocean.
Due to insufficient and illegal maintenance on the pipeline, 124 miles of the line must be replaced. Rather than building and maintaining a safe line in the first place, ExxonMobil now wants to truck oil, with all the attendant air pollution and accident/spills, to operating portions of the pipeline in Santa Maria and Kern County. This will occur for several years until a new pipeline is built.
I live in Buellton, sandwiched between the 101 and a future new pipeline running west of Oak Valley Elementary School. Our neighborhood has already been heavily gassed, throughout a night, with crude oil vapors a few years ago, due to a Plains Pipeline botched oil pipeline cleaning process.
Now, due to poor, Reagan-era pipeline construction, pseudo pipeline maintenance, and greed for 30 years, several communities and thousands of people will be exposed to cancer-causing diesel fumes and several truck accidents and oil spills if Santa Barbara County approves the ExxonMobil project.
ExxonMobil claims this dangerous, mass trucking operation will provide hundreds of local jobs. It actually will provide a relatively few temporary trucking jobs while Exxon violates the Santa Barbara County Climate Action Plan by dramatically increasing fossil fuel production and use locally. Implementing the Climate Action Plan is providing hundreds more clean energy jobs than the current oil industry does.
If ExxonMobil wants to restart its offshore platforms, let it build a safe, legal, and well-maintained pipeline first, to transport its product, as it agreed to do 35 years ago. Santa Barbara County citizens should not have to pay for the oil industry’s greedy malfeasance for the last three decades! Keep the spill-prone, polluting trucks off our roads!
Larry Bishop
Buellton
This article appears in Aug 20-27, 2020.
