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.