Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Coast Guard Investigates Oil Slick off California Coast




Wednesday, July 29, 2015



The U.S. Coast Guard was investigating a large oil sheen off the California coast west of Santa Barbara on Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the agency said.
The slick, which was about 60 feet (18 meters) wide, was spotted about 1,000 yards (meters) offshore from Goleta State Beach west of Santa Barbara, said Coast Guard spokeswoman Petty Officer Andrea Anderson.
Anderson could not give the approximate length of the sheen.
In May, as much as 2,400 barrels of crude oil were spilled onto a pristine beach about 15 miles (24 km) west of Goleta when a pipeline ruptured along the coast. But there were no immediate reports of any link between the two incidents.
"We don't have a definite source yet," Anderson said of the oil sheen discovered on Wednesday.
David Zaniboni, a spokesman for the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, told Los Angeles television station KABC that his agency also has not identified the source of the sheen and as a result was not calling the incident an oil spill.
A Coast Guard helicopter was surveying the area of the oil sheen, and other members of the agency went out by vessel to take a closer look, Anderson said.

The Coast Guard urged individuals not to make contact with the sheen and to report any oil sightings to its National Response Center.
Zaniboni told KABC that the area regularly experiences natural oil seepage but that firefighters were called when two kayakers came into shore after crossing into black oil in the water.
"All I can go by is what we were told by the kayakers, and they were saying this was more than they've ever seen," Zaniboni told KABC.
Goleta State Beach County Park and pier remained open, Santa Barbara County officials said.
Plains All American, which operated the coastal pipeline that ruptured and caused the spill in May, said the latest oil sheen could not have come from one of their pipelines since they do not operate any underwater pipes in the area, company spokeswoman Meredith Mathews said.



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Authorities are trying to determine the cause of a large sheen of oil spotted off the coast of Santa Barbara County in Thursday.

A survey from the air and sea Wednesday afternoon should help authorities determine if an oil sheen is part of a growing spill, natural seepage or part of a pipeline rupture earlier this year, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
The sheen was spotted by a couple of kayakers about 1,000 feet off Goleta beach about 10:45 a.m., the Santa Barbara County Fire Department said. The department notified the Coast Guard, which sent out a safety team on a boat and dispatched a helicopter to survey the sheen, said USCG Petty Officer Andrea Anderson.

The team in the helicopter will estimate the sheen’s size and try to determine where it’s going and where it came from, Anderson said. The team in the water will pull samples of the oil and analyze its composition, which could help determine if oil is from natural seepage, part of an off-shore drilling operation or from the Plains Pipeline spill that closed Refugio State Beach in May.

That spill May 19 released an estimated 101,000 gallons of crude along the Gaviota coast, with tens of thousands of gallons estimated to have made it into the ocean.

The slick was reported to be about 50 feet wide, said Capt. Dave Zaniboni of the Santa Barbara County fire.

The waters off Santa Barbara County occasionally get oil from natural seepage, but the kayakers said the slick they encountered Wednesday was larger than a typical natural spill, Zaniboni said.