This blog presents Metropolitan Engineering Consulting & Forensics (MEC&F) claim management and claim investigation analyses of some of the typical claims we handle
GALT, Calif. (KCRA) —A Union Pacific train has derailed south of the Galt cemetery, KCRA 3 has confirmed.
A Union Pacific train derailed south of Galt, causing 29 cars to come off the tracks.
Officials said 29 of the train's 75 cars derailed about 3:30 p.m. at Kost Road. The train was headed north from Lathrop. The train's final destination was Proviso, Illinois.
Some of the cars tipped over and are on their side.
No injuries have been reported, and officials said the derailment is not considered a hazardous situation.
Union Pacific officials said the train was carrying consumer goods. The cause of the derailment is under investigation.
There have been no impacts to the Union Pacific train system, but Amtrak was reporting delays.
One northbound Amtrak train was experiencing a 20-minute delay and a southbound train was experiencing an hour-and-a-half delay. Stay with KCRA 3 News for more on this developing story.
In this
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 photo, a van rests against a train engine after a
Collision in Middletown, Ohio. An adult was killed and 10 others were
injured when the van, transporting students to evening vacation Bible
school, crashed into the side of the train. The Ohio State Highway
Patrol said the gates were down and the warning lights activated at the
crossing when the van approached. (Todd Jackson/WHIO-TV) MANDATORY
CREDIT.
Associated Press
By DAN SEWELL, Associated Press
CINCINNATI, OHIO (AP)
—
A van carrying vacation Bible school students crashed through a
crossing gate and into the side of a freight train at a southwest Ohio
rail crossing, killing an adult passenger and injuring nine children and
the driver, authorities said Wednesday.
The Ohio State Highway Patrol said the gates were down and the
warning lights activated when the van approached the crossing in the
city of Middletown on Tuesday evening. Investigators were trying to
determine why the driver kept going and crashed the 2002 Ford passenger
van into the CSX train.
The van was taking students to evening vacation Bible school at the
Church at Mayfield in Middletown, some 30 miles north of Cincinnati.
The patrol said the front-seat passenger, 62-year-old Jan Martin,
died at Atrium Medical Center in Middletown nearly two hours after the
crash. Police said nine children, ranging in age from 7 to 10 years old,
and the female driver, also 62, suffered injuries that aren't
considered life-threatening. They were taken to hospitals.
"As far as I understand, everyone is doing as well as can be
expected," the Rev. Gary Ashley told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
He was at Atrium Medical Center where his wife, the van's driver,
remained hospitalized. He said Judith Ashley had multiple injuries and
he hadn't been able to talk with her yet.
Jacksonville, Florida-based CSX said in a statement that the company
is cooperating with the investigation. Spokeswoman Melanie Cost said the
train had come from the Middletown Yard that regularly serves the area.
"Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the accident in
Middletown," Cost said in an email, referring other questions to police.
The patrol said its investigation was continuing.
A statement on the small nondenominational church's Facebook page
announced plans for a prayer vigil Wednesday evening. It said the church
lost a member of its family.
"Jan will be sorely missed because she was loved by all," the
statement said. "She has gone home to be with her Lord, and left this
world doing what she loved, serving Him."
Ashley said vacation Bible school planned for the rest of the week has been canceled.
"We just stopped right there," he said. "There's just too much going on. We can't go on with it."
July 29, 2015
Contact: Les Dorr, Jr. or Alison Duquette
Phone: (202) 267-3883; Email: les.dorr@faa.gov
WASHINGTON, DC
Responding to recent incidents in
which unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), also known as “drones,”
interfered with manned aircraft involved in wildland firefighting
operations, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) is supporting the U.S. Department of the Interior
and U.S. Forest Service in their simple message to drone operators: If
you fly; we can’t.
“Flying a drone near aerial firefighting
aircraft doesn’t just pose a hazard to the pilots,” said U.S.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “When aircraft are grounded
because an unmanned aircraft is in the vicinity, lives are put at
greater risk.”
Often a temporary flight restriction (TFR) is put
in place around wildfires to protect firefighting aircraft. No one
other than the agencies involved in the firefighting effort can fly any
manned or unmanned aircraft in such a TFR.
Anyone who violates a TFR and
endangers the safety of manned aircraft could be subject to civil
and/or criminal penalties. Even if there is no TFR, operating a UAS
could still pose a hazard to firefighting aircraft and would violate
Federal Aviation Regulations.
“The FAA’s top priority is safety.
If you endanger manned aircraft or people on the ground with an unmanned
aircraft, you could be liable for a fine ranging from $1,000 to a
maximum of $25,000,” said FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. “Know the
rules before you fly. If you don’t, serious penalties could be coming
your way for jeopardizing these important missions.”
Since so
many people operate unmanned aircraft with little or no aviation
experience, the FAA is promoting voluntary compliance and working to
educate UAS operators about how they can operate safely under current
regulations and laws. The agency has partnered with industry and the
modeling community in a public outreach campaign called “Know Before You
Fly.”
The campaign recently reminded UAS users to respect wildfire operations. The National Interagency Fire Center also posted a video warning for users to, “Be Smart. Be Safe. Stay Away.”
Additionally,
the FAA provided guidance to law enforcement agencies because they are
often in the best position to deter, detect, immediately investigate,
and, as appropriate, pursue enforcement actions to stop unauthorized or
unsafe unmanned aircraft operations.
So remember this simple
message around wildfires: If you fly, they can’t. Keep your drone on the
ground and let firefighters and aircraft do their jobs. And, if you see
someone flying a drone near a wildfire, report it immediately to local
law enforcement and the nearest FAA Flight Standards District Office
with as much information as possible. You can find the closest FAA
office at:
The three largest ships yards in the world are in Korean and they are struggling for work and losing lots of money.
Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, Samsung Heavy Industries
and Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) say it is due to plummeting oil
prices and delayed offshore projects. The giant yards are reporting
significant losses in 2015’s second quarter-- Daewoo leads the way
reporting a 3.03 billion KRW ($2.62 billion) operating loss. Samsung
reports1.55 trillion KRW loss while Hyundai says it lost 171 billion
won. The combined losses is the 4.75 trillion KRW or $4.1 billion.
Daewoo cites delays in the construction of gas oil rigs as well as
lower freight rates in the cargo markets. Korean yards invested heavily
in oil and gas rigs around 2010 in an effort to circumvent competition
with the Chinese yards. Oil prices were sitting at about $100 per barrel
at the time and the industry was booming.
The maritime sector on whole has been sluggish due to the global
recession and economic slowdown. China has been the world’s workbench
for the last decade or so. It shipyards have been some of the busiest in
the world, but oil prices have plummeted by 60 percent and demand for
drilling rigs and ships has slowed.
The 2nd quarter losses for the three Korean giants were Daewoo’s 2015
Q2 revenue fell 63.1 percent, Samsung’s revenues fell 44.8 percent, and
Hyundai posted a 240 KRW loss down from last year’s loss during the
same period of 489 KRW.
Missouri manufacturer exposes workers to amputation hazards.
OSHA proposes penalties of more than $46K for 11 safety and health violations
Employer name: Clemco Industries Inc.
Investigation site: One Cable Car Drive, Washington, Missouri
Investigation findings: The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration's St. Louis Area Office issued 10 serious
and one other-than-serious safety and health violations to the Clemco
Industries on July 24. The company manufactures abrasive blasting
equipment such as hoods, valves and hoppers and employs about 150
workers.
The serious violations include:
Failing to comply with machine safety procedures such as the use of locking devices, emergency stop switches and guards
Not training employees about machine safety procedures and hazards
Failing to inspect ropes and chains monthly.
OSHA issued one other-than-serious violation for failing to label containers of bio-hazardous materials.
Quote: "Thousands of workers suffer lacerations,
amputations and fractures each year because they come in contact with
operating parts of machinery," said Bill McDonald, OSHA's area director
in St. Louis. "The use of manufacturer installed and common-sense safety
procedures can prevent these injuries. Clemco Industries needs to
review its programs to keep its workers safe."
Proposed Penalties: $46,800 To ask questions; obtain compliance assistance; file a complaint or
report amputations, eye loss, workplace hospitalizations, fatalities or
situations posing imminent danger to workers, the public should call
OSHA's toll-free hotline at 800-321-OSHA (6742) or the agency's St.
Louis Area Office at 314-425-4261.
Of course drinking water from plastic bottles can be also dangerous due to the leaching of plastics from the bottle
By Alana Semuels
14 hours ago
FLINT, MICHIGAN
Melissa Mays looks
around the emergency room at a frail, elderly man in a wheelchair and a
woman with a hacking cough and can’t quite believe she’s here. Until a
few months ago, she was healthy—an active mother of three boys who found
time to go to the gym while holding down a job as a media consultant
and doing publicity for bands.
But
lately, she’s been feeling sluggish. She’s developed a rash on her leg,
and clumps of her hair are falling out. She ended up in the emergency
room last week after feeling “like [her] brain exploded,” hearing pops,
and experiencing severe pain in one side of her head.
Mays
blames her sudden spate of health problems on the water in her hometown
of Flint. She says it has a blue tint when it comes out of her faucet,
and lab results indicate it has high amounts of copper and lead. Her
family hasn’t been drinking the water for some months, but they have
been bathing in it, since they have no alternative.
“It set off a train wreck in my system,” Mays
told me, sitting in the emergency room. Later, doctors would put her on
beta blockers after finding problems in the arteries around her brain.
In
the past 16 months, abnormally high levels of e. coli,
trihamlomethanes, lead, and copper have been found in the city’s water,
which comes from the local river (adead body and anabandoned car
were also found in the same river). Mays and other residents say that
the city government endangered their health when it stopped buying water
from Detroit last year and instead started selling residents treated
water from the Flint River. “I’ve never seen a first-world city have such disregard for human safety,” she told me.
While Flint’s government and its financial
struggles certainly have a role to play in the city’s water woes, the
city may actually be a canary in the coal mine, signaling more problems
to come across the country. “Flint is an extreme case, but nationally,
there’s been a lack of investment in water infrastructure,” said Eric
Scorsone, an economist at Michigan State University who has followed the
case of Flint. “This is a common problem nationally— infrastructure
maintenance has not kept up.”
Indeed, water scarcity in the parched West
might be getting the most news coverage, but infrastructure delays and
climate change are causing big problems for cities in the North and
Midwest, too. Last summer, hundreds of thousands of people in Toledo
were told not to drink tap water because tests showed abnormallyhigh levels
of microcystins, perhaps related to algae blooms in Lake Erie.
Microcystins can cause fever, headaches, vomiting, and—in rare
cases—seizures. Heavy rainfall has caused backups in the filtering process at overloaded water-treatment plants in Pennsylvania, and so residents arefrequently finding themselves under advisories to boil water. And Chicago, whichinstalled lead service lines in many areas in the 1980s, is now facing a spike in lead-contaminated tap water.
In 2013, America received a “D” in the drinking-water category of the American Society for Civil Engineers’Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.
The report found that most of the nation’s drinking-water
infrastructure is “nearing the end of its useful life.” Replacing the
nation’s pipes would cost more than $1 trillion. The country’s
wastewater infrastructure also got a “D” grade.
.
Hydrant flushing in Flint (Alana Semuels)
Like
many cities in America, Flint has lost residents but still has to
provide services like water and sewer and road maintenance within the
same boundaries. All while bringing in less tax revenue to pay for it.
Flint has not had the money to spend on crucial infrastructure upgrades,
and has left old pipes in place for longer than most engineers would
recommend. Water prices are rising in Flint, like they are in lots of
other cities, but the quality of water is getting worse, not better.
Flint has financially
struggled for longer than most American cities. The birthplace of
General Motors, the city began having problems in the 1980s and 1990s
when GM started closing plants. By 2001, its unemployment rate was 11.2
percent, which grew every year until it reached 25 percent in 2009.
Families began to seek opportunity elsewhere, leaving behind empty
homes. As the city’s population declined, it struggled to come up with
the revenue to provide basic services such as police and fire coverage
for residents. The water system, though, was still a “cash cow,” said
Scorsone, the professor, so Flint borrowed from the water authority to
pay its city bills.
Flint has been buying water from Detroit since 1967. The Detroit Water and Sewer Department, in the booming post-war years, expanded
its services, adding 1,000 square miles of territory. But as the
population began to shrink in both Detroit and Flint, fewer customers
were left to pay for infrastructure and services. Detroit began raising
rates, but Flint didn’t pass those rate increases on to customers
because residents were struggling economically and politicians worried
they’d get voted out of office, said Scorsone. That meant that little to
no money was spent on infrastructure upgrades.
In 2004, Detroit charged Flint $11.06 per
million cubic foot of water. By 2013, it was charging $19.12 per million
cubic foot, a 73 percent increase.
“It’s a combination of bad management and bad economics,” Scorsone said.
.
Downtown Flint (Carlos Osorio/AP)
By 2011, Flint had a $15 million deficit and Michigan Governor Rick Snyderappointed an emergency manager
to take control over the city. It was a move that upset many, since
emergency managers are used to replace elected officials such as city
councils and mayors and have widespread authority, but less connection
to residents.
In 2012, Michigan voters repealed an emergency-manager law
that had allowed emergency managers to take over troubled cities and
school districts. But the state legislature
then passed a different, and more far-reaching, emergency-manager law
later that year. A group of citizens, including some from Flint, filed a
lawsuit arguing that the law violated theirconstitutional right to equal protection. In November, a judge allowed the suit to go forward.
Unwilling
to pay rising Detroit water costs, Genesee County, where Flint is
located, decided to work with other Michigan counties to build a
pipeline from Lake Huron to mid-Michigan. But the pipeline, called the
Karegnondi Water Authority, won’t be completed until late 2016. So in
2013, Flint decided that until the pipeline was finished, it would pump
water from the Flint River, treat it, and sell it to residents. The plan
would save the city much-needed money: The annual cost to treat water
from the Flint River is $2.8 million, said Howard Croft, the city’s
public-works director. Buying water from Detroit, on the other hand,
costs $12 million a year.
But
making river water safe for public use is a much more difficult task
than treating reservoir or lake water. Rivers are subject to runoff and
the water quality can change quickly with air temperature or heavy
storms. Flint found this out as soon as it turned off the pumps from
Detroit and started pumping its own water in April 2014.
Residents said they noticed the difference
almost immediately. Melissa Mays says her water started smelling like
rotten eggs, and had a strange tint when coming out of the faucet,
sometimes blue, sometimes yellowish.
Claire McClinton, a GM retiree, said her house began to smell like garbage. Another resident, Bethany
Hazard, says her water started coming out of the faucet brown and
smelling like a sewer, and when she called the city to complain, she was
told the water was fine.
The water was not fine. First, tests showed there wasfecal coliform bacteria
in the water, and the city had to issue numerous boil advisories to
citizens. In response, engineers upped the amount of chlorine in its
water, leading to dangerously high levels oftrihalomethanes,
or TTHMs, which put Flint in violation of the Clean Water Act. TTHMs
are especially dangerous when inhaled, making showering in hot water
toxic.
By October, GM, which still has a plant in
Flint, had started noticing that the water was corroding parts of its
engines. The plant switched off the Flint water, and started trucking in
water from elsewhere. It asked the city for permission to use water
from Flint Township, rather than the city of Flint (Flint Township was
still buying water from Detroit), and switched back to Detroit water,
said spokesman Tom Wickham.
LeeAnne
Walters didn’t notice any changes right away. But a few months after
the switch, she noticed that her children were getting rashes between
their fingers, on their shins, on the back of their knees. Her
four-year-old son, who has a compromised immune system, started breaking
out into scaly rashes whenever he swam in their salt-water pool, which
he’d used since birth. Then Walters’ 14-year-old son got extremely sick
and missed a month of school.
So she sent her water off to Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech environmental engineering professor who had forced the CDC to admit it had misled the public about the amount of lead in D.C.’s water.
Edwards was shocked when he found that Walters’
lead content was 13,000 parts per billion. The EPA recommends keeping
lead content below 15 parts per billion.
“At first I didn’t believe the results because they were the worst I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot,” Edwards told me.
.
LeeAnne Walters shows a water filter from her home. (Alana Semuels)
None
of the samples Walters sent were safe to drink. Some had lead content
of 200 parts per billion. Over 30 samples, the average lead content was
2,000 parts per billion, which meant that no matter how long Walters let
her taps run, it still would have been toxic. This could easily have
been causing the health problems that Walters and her children were
experiencing.
“Lead is the best known neurotoxin, it
adversely impacts every system in the human body,” Edwards told me.
“Certainly it could have caused children’s lead poisoning.”
The
city says it does not know why so much lead was found in Walters’
pipes, but Edwards has a theory: Many cities have lead pipes, and when
water sits in those pipes, the lead can leech into the water. So cities
usually add corrosion-control chemicals, such as phosphates, to keep the
lead out of the water. But because Flint didn’t take such precautions when they began pumping their own water, “the public health protection was gone,” Edwards says.
The
water situation has made people furious with the city, and with the
emergency-manager system of government. Residents say Flint first
learned about the high levels of TTHMs in May 2014, but didn’t inform
residents until January. City meetings have devolved into a mob of angry
residentsyelling at the emergency manager.
“We still
don’t have a true democracy,” said Claire McClinton, the retiree. “As
soon as [the emergency manager] sets foot in your city, your local
government is gone.” In March, Flint’s city council voted to “do all things necessary”
to once again purchase water from Detroit, but the city’s emergency
manager nixed the vote, calling it “incomprehensible.” The emergency
manager stepped down in April, announcing that the city was on firmer
financial footing, but one of his last orders was that the city councilcould not change any of his orders for a year, including the order to switch to Flint water.
Flint last week sent outyet another
notice that tap water had higher than acceptable levels of TTHMs. There
are currently two lawsuits pending about the water issues, one of which
questions the city’sfinancial accounting, another demands that the city go back to Detroit water because Flint’s water quality is so poor.
Drainage into the Flint River (Alana Semuels)
Many
Flint residents have a visceral reaction to the water problem, and have
focused their attention on the emergency manager, on their city’s
finances, and on the unfairness of their situation.
“How many times can they kick the people who live here?” Melissa Mays asked me in frustration.
But
it’s not one emergency manager, or one bad decision about pumping water
from the Flint River that has led these problems—and that might be the
scariest part of all. Neglected infrastructure is really to blame, but
it’s not quite as satisfying to blame old pipes as it is to blame the
people in charge. And the city’s financial woes have a lot to do with
its shrinking population, but it’s hard to blame the people who left in
hopes of finding employment or a better life elsewhere.
Eroding infrastructure isn’t unique to Flint. Things just broke down there first.
In
a report released to its members last month, the American Water Works
Association warned that many utilities across the country won’t have the
money to perform much-needed infrastructure upgrades over the upcoming
decades. Utilities are seeing water sales declining as households and
commercial clients become more efficient, but, like Flint, still have to
provide the same infrastructure as before with less revenue.
“There
is a gap between the financial needs of water and wastewater systems
and the means to pay for these services through rates and fees,” thereport read.
“They
don’t have money to even do the best practices according to our
currently lousy best practices,” says Edwards, of Virginia Tech. “They
have even less money than normal to address these very, very expensive
problems.”
And if utilities can’t pay for much-needed upgrades, other cities might soon find themselves in the same situation as Flint.
Milwaukee firefighters and the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office are at Timmerman Airport on the city’s northwest side — where a small passenger plane crashed and was engulfed in flames on Wednesday evening, July 29th.
The initial call for first responders came in at 6:11 p.m.
The pilot of the plane had radioed in for a "go around" — which signals
that an approach or landing is not working out — just before the fire,
according to a report from WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee.
The crash was reported shortly after 6 p.m. when the
aircraft crashed and became engulfed in flames, said Fran McLaughlin,
spokeswoman for the Milwaukee County sheriff's office.
Flight manifests do not indicate
Timmerman as the planned landing field for the aircraft, and no
information was immediately available on its occupants, McLaughlin said.
The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office confirms at least one person is dead from this incident.
FOX6 News spoke with a family who’s home butts up right to the edge of the airport and saw everything. For folks living just feet away from the wreckage, this is a sight they will never forget.
Kenneth Gipp heard a noise just after 6 p.m. and looked out his brother’s window to discover a shocking sight.
“Like a loud engine noise. I saw the aircraft leaning real hard to the right, it looked like the wing hit the ground first,” said Gipp.
Gipp saw the nose of the plane crashing into the ground.
“There were just a line of flames going from where it hit up to the plane,” said Gipp.
For other witnesses, there are prayers for whoever was on board.
“I don’t think anyone survived,” said Gipp.
A spokeswoman for the FAA says the FAA and the NTSB are gathering information about this crash and continue to investigate.
Following
a boating accident on Cayuga Lake that sent two to the hospital, the
operator, a Broome County sheriff’s deputy, is facing a charge of
reckless operation of a vessel.
The Seneca County Sheriff’s Office announced the completion of its investigation Tuesday.
On
the night of July 10, Dan Balmer, 45, of Johnson City, was heading
south in a 19-foot Larson boat on Cayuga Lake, near Sheldrake Point,
when he failed to see a lighted navigation marker and collided with it,
the sheriff’s office reported.
Balmer and his passenger,
Marguerite A. Malone, 35, of Johnson City, sustained non-life
threatening injuries and were transported by South Seneca Ambulance to
Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse.
The boat was damaged extensively in the crash, the sheriff’s office said. “There
was no evidence from our deputies at the scene that alcohol was
involved in the accident,” Seneca County Undersheriff Gary Sullivan said
Wednesday. “Mr. Balmer just told us he did not see this object in the
water and collided with it.”
Accidents like this are not uncommon
on the lake, he said, and the sheriff’s office typically handles those
investigations. Boaters sometimes inadvertently crash into objects on
the water, such as docks, buoys or other boats, he said.
Balmer
was charged with reckless operation of a vessel, a navigation law
misdemeanor. He was ordered to appear Aug. 25 in the Ovid Town Court.
He
has been a Broome County road patrol deputy since 2000 and previously
served with Endicott police, according to Broome County Sheriff David
Harder.
Balmer resumed his patrol duties on Saturday, and it is
the sheriff’s office policy not to take any action regarding employment
status for an infraction such as reckless operation of a vessel, Harder
said Wednesday.
“It’s no different than getting a speeding
ticket,” Harder said. “He’s taking care of the matter, he told me he was
issued a summons, and he will inform me of the outcome.”
Seneca
County Sheriff’s deputies were assisted at the scene of the boating
accident by the New York State Police, Interlaken and Ovid fire
departments, and South Seneca Ambulance.
Staff writer Anthony Borrelli contributed to this report.
Addison
Fire Chief Jerry Morawski and Assistant Chief John Beach survey the
damage. Photo by C.J. Carnacchio.
July 29, 2015 -
Propane gas is the suspected cause of a July 22 explosion inside an Addison Township home.
Firefighters were called to the 2600 block of Lakeville Rd., between Hosner and Lake George roads, for a reported structure fire.
According to Addison Fire Chief Jerry Morawski, the homeowner's parents entered the house and immediately smelled a very strong, foul odor which they described as "rotten eggs."
They opened a couple windows and the front door to air out the house while they were adding salt to the water softener.
At some point, there was an explosion that originated from the crawl space beneath the house. A neighbor heard it and called 9-1-1.
The blast was strong enough that it knocked the couple off their feet, caused the house to shift off its foundation and blew out some porch windows, according to Morawski.
"The whole sun porch was dislodged from the house a good 4 to 6 inches," he said.
Neither of the parents was injured and the amount of fire damage was limited to a few areas in the walls and some insulation, the chief noted.
"There wasn't much of a fire," he said.
The Oakland County Sheriff's Fire Investigations Unit was called to the scene and is investigating to determine the cause. Source: http://www.clarkstonnews.com
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.
///////////////-----------------//////////
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.
