Cleaning up the thousands of gallons of crude oil that fouled Refugio State Beach on May 19 has cost more than $60 million, officials said Wednesday, and the figure is expected to grow as the cleanup continues.
Cleanup costs hit a peak of about $3 million per day after a ruptured pipe spilled up to 101,000 gallons of oil along the Gaviota coast in Santa Barbara County last month, said Meredith Mathews, a spokeswoman for Plains All American Pipeline, which operates the broken pipeline.
The company is paying to deploy more than 1,000 workers, skimming boats, ecological monitors and other resources along a 96.5-mile stretch of coast from Gaviota to Point Mugu near Oxnard.
State and federal agencies responding to the spill will bill the company for their costs.
Workers have cleaned up 76% of the damaged stretch of beach, mostly sandy areas that had only trace amounts of oil, officials said.
On Wednesday, workers at Refugio State Beach tediously placed oiled rocks on large sheets of plastic, scraping the oil off with putty knives and wire brushes.
The cleanup effort is now focused on cleaning soil, boulders and bedrock that were stained when up to 21,000 gallons of thick crude made its way from where the pipe ruptured down a storm culvert and into the Pacific, said Eric Hjelstrom, state parks superintendent for the Santa Barbara area.