Ripple Effect From '93 Oil Spill Swirls On : Oxnard: A year later, cleanup of 84,000 gallons of Bush Co. crude is incomplete, officials say, and legal issues are unresolved.

By JEFF McDONALD

Dec. 25, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

No one at Bush Oil Co. noticed the sharp drop in oil pressure last December as a ruptured pipeline unleashed black crude into a man-made lake and surrounding wetlands near Oxnard.

Crude oil continued to flow into McGrath Lake for four days until a slick spread hundreds of yards into the Pacific Ocean and was spotted by federal inspectors flying in a helicopter to an offshore oil platform on Christmas morning.

By the time the pipe was shut down, the line buried beneath Harbor Boulevard had released 84,000 gallons of oil to become one of Ventura County’s worst oil spills.

It took months and $10 million to mop up the oil that soiled miles of beaches and inundated the sensitive habitat. Workers clear-cut acres of sensitive coastal vegetation. Swarms of volunteers scrubbed hundreds of oil-coated birds and other wildlife, but only saved a fraction of the dying ducks, coots and other waterfowl. An endangered pelican and snowy plover were among the casualties.

One year later, most of the oil, contaminated dirt and sand has been scooped up and carted away. Yet investigators still find oily residue buried in the sediment as they assess the wetland’s recovery.

“We’ve noticed residual petroleum in areas gathered in the creek,” said Robert Ricker, a California Department of Fish and Game toxicologist. “So we’re continuing to monitor to get an accurate picture of where it is and how long it will persist.”

Bush Oil executives have not admitted responsibility, though they pleaded no contest in August to criminal charges stemming from the spill and paid $600,000 in fines. The foreman on duty also pleaded no contest to water pollution and was sentenced to 18 months probation and 320 hours of beach cleanup.

State and federal prosecutors are now preparing a civil case against the company, which could lead to millions of dollars more in fines to pay for wetlands restoration.

For their part, company officials said public agencies should share any blame for the spill because they ignored early reports of the leak. Nonetheless, officials at Bush Oil and its parent company, Berry Petroleum, said they have done the best cleanup possible and have taken steps to prevent future leaks.

“We’ve done quite a bit of investment to make sure that nothing remotely similar to this ever happens again,” said Ralph Goehring, chief financial officer of Berry Petroleum.

It all started four days before last Christmas, when a corroded 8-inch transfer pipe pumping 1,200 barrels a day beneath Harbor Boulevard ruptured from high pressure and old age.

Bush Oil officials insisted at a hastily called news conference Christmas night that only 10 barrels of oil had spilled, an estimate they raised to 250 barrels within 24 hours. But the next day a clearer estimation of the leakage emerged: this time an eightfold increase to 2,000 barrels, some 84,000 gallons of unprocessed crude.

Further spreading the mess, an unidentified farmer activated a pump at the lake sometime before Christmas, pushing thousands of gallons of contaminated water out to sea.

“My first impression was that we had a mess and I wasn’t going home for Christmas dinner,” said Mark Caywood, a state Department of Fish and Game lieutenant who was one of the first officials to arrive at the lake that Christmas morning.

By midday, dozens of cleanup workers and government agents had converged on the scene, where thick globs of oil clumped along the lake’s edges and the wetland surface was capped with six inches of heavy black tar.

Hundreds of migratory birds and other wildlife coated with oil began clawing their way to the shores, lodging themselves in thick reeds and marshland in desperate attempts to free themselves from the toxic substance.

By nightfall, more than 50 workers had been summoned to mount cleanup operations on three fronts: the freshwater lake, miles of beaches and the offshore slick.

The next day, a Sunday, hundreds more cleanup workers joined wildlife rescue personnel to pitch in. Beach crews fanned out over miles of coastline, raking miles of sand for golf ball-sized tar bits while offshore workers encircled and cleaned up what oil they could.

Huge vacuums sucked up clumps of oil as they were loosened from the lake shore by wind generated by the beating blades of a hovering helicopter. Volunteers washed thick blankets of oil from mud hens, ducks and other waterfowl.

“The product was like liquid asphalt--very, very thick--and the animals were literally stuck to themselves,” said Mimi Wood-Harris of the Berkeley-based International Bird Rescue and Research Center.

“In terms of the consistency of the product, it was the worst I had ever worked with,” she said. “And I’ve been doing this for six years.”

The easiest of the three cleanup efforts was offshore, where roughly 75 barrels, more than 3,000 gallons, is estimated to have spread into the Santa Barbara Channel. The ocean cleanup was completed by 9 a.m. Monday, barely 48 hours after the slick was first spotted.

“We did what we practice 100 times a year: containment and recovery operations,” said Darryle Waldron, manager of the Carpinteria-based Clean Seas, a commercial recovery company called in early Christmas morning.

“The offshore size was relatively small, probably 60 to 80 barrels,” Waldron said, “about the size of one tanker truck that overturns in Los Angeles every day.”

Most of the oil had gathered on shore, choking the slough leading from the pipeline leak across Harbor Boulevard to McGrath Lake, and badly soiling another drainage canal leading from the wetland to the ocean.

Outboard skiffs floated booms across the lake, dragging the oil toward a cleanup station, where men in protective white jumpsuits pumped the product into waiting 5,000-gallon tanker trucks.

At the drainage slough between the lake and beachfront, crews battled thousands of gallons of sticky black crude that had congealed in the stream bed like a thick stew.

In the dense vegetation between the lake and Harbor Boulevard, other crews carved out a work area from the trees and brush, where subcontractors hauled off tons of oil-stained soil and shrubbery.

Light breezes, meanwhile, carried the stench of raw oil across the 160-acre cleanup site and beyond.

“Marshland hasn’t got the potential for recovering fast, and beyond that, it’s hard to get all the oil out,” said state Department of Fish and Game biologist John Grant, who supervised cleanup of the grove between Harbor Boulevard and the lake.

“The oil gets ground in, then it makes problems that it’s slow to recover from,” said Grant, who spent weeks digging out and then rebuilding the entire stream.

By midmorning Sunday, a team of professional and volunteer wildlife rescue personnel had set up camp in a flat area northwest of McGrath Lake under the direction of Wood-Harris of International Bird Rescue.

The death toll among waterfowl and other species rose by the hour as relief workers combed the lake shore in search of stranded animals. Gloved rescuers used cotton swabs to clean the birds’ oil-soaked eyes and a saline solution to wash their bodies.

“I had never seen so much confusion in my life,” said Estelle Busch, who runs the Wildlife Care Network, a Santa Barbara nonprofit group that volunteered its resources to help save the soiled animals.

“When you have an oil spill, the chain of command is very confusing,” said Busch, citing the litany of local, state and federal agencies that answered the emergency call.

“You have to go through all this stuff before you can even touch a bird,” she said. “But I spent 23 days washing birds, cleaning them.”

An impromptu care center was established on the grounds of the Ventura County Animal Regulation office in Camarillo, where volunteers treated as many waterfowl as they could.

But they fought a losing battle. Very few survived.

“It was messy and smelly,” said wildlife rescue volunteer Susan Venegas. “It was a little distressing to see the birds, but we did save some and I felt good about that.”

According to Wood-Harris, relief workers were able to save fewer than 40 animals, including a variety of birds, some lizards, a turtle and one toad. Only 25 of those creatures ever made it back to their habitat, she said.

“We did lose a number of animals, but every single one of them would definitely have died had there not been intervention,” Wood-Harris said. “We look at it as a success if we save one life.”

The California Department of Fish and Game is now preparing a natural resources damage assessment on the region, a document to serve as the foundation for the civil case against Bush Oil and Berry Petroleum.

Department of Fish and Game officials and other biologists have been studying the McGrath Lake habitat over the past year, inventorying the returning vegetation and migrating sea birds to measure the spill’s full impact.

The process is tediously slow.

“They can take years,” said Toni Abajian, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist surveying McGrath Lake for the federal government.

Abajian declined to discuss in detail how the habitat is recovering, saying she did not want to jeopardize the pending civil case against the oil company.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Jennifer W. Rosenfeld, handling the case against Bush Oil on behalf of numerous state agencies, said negotiations with the company are ongoing, but that any settlement or civil filing is months away.

“We are still actively investigating the damages that occurred out there,” Rosenfeld said. “With damages to natural resources such as occurred in this case, it can take a long time to determine the full extent.”

State investigators are looking into every aspect of the case, including the firm’s immediate and long-term response, as well as the overall impact to the ecosystem, she said.

Any civil damages recovered from Berry, a sum likely to be in the seven-figure range, would be used to pay for continuing restoration work.

“There may be lasting effects on the habitat as a result of the spill,” Rosenfeld said.

Ricker, the Department of Fish and Game toxicologist heading the state’s damage assessment, said that more work clearly needs to be done at the site. Still, some progress has been made.

“We’re starting to see some recovery,” he said. “At least the plant life is returning.”

It is too early to speculate on how long the spill may affect the wetland, Ricker said. But in some cases, such residual oil can last for decades, he said.

Several other officials also said McGrath Lake and surrounding wetlands are far from full recovery. Inches beneath the sand along the lake shore lie huge pockets of oily residue.

“I know there are some spots where there is still oil left,” said Shirley Birosik of the state Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles, one of the agencies involved in the civil case.

“Probably most of the (remaining) oil is on the edge of the lake,” said Birosik, who visited the site as recently as September. “Getting the oil cleaned up in the sediment is what’s important.”

Glen M. Reiser, a private attorney retained by the Ventura County district attorney to prosecute the criminal case earlier this year, said he found ample evidence that more cleanup needs to be performed when he visited the lake this summer.

“Unless it was some aberration that we were standing on a pocket of oil, there needs to be further examination and cleanup,” Reiser said. “(Fish and Game) does the best it can under the circumstances, but in this case there could maybe be some remedial cleanup done that would assist the habitat.”

Reiser said his investigation found that the pipe Bush used to move its oil beneath Harbor Boulevard was an abandoned, badly corroded gas line never intended to transport heavy crude.

He said he also discovered that company officials failed to repair a faulty safety valve on the line, choosing to remove it entirely rather than interrupt production despite complaints from oil field workers.

The pipeline first ruptured Dec. 16, 1993, Reiser said, spilling at least 40 gallons of oil. But Bush never reported that leak and continued to use the failed line until increasing pressure caused the major rupture Dec. 21, which leaked for days before being discovered, he said.

“Berry’s conduct reflects a substandard approach to oil field operations,” Reiser said.

The ruptured pipe itself was excavated in January and remains in the custody of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, state prosecutor Rosenfeld said. A new system was installed weeks later.

Goehring, Berry chief financial officer, acknowledged that his firm might have violated company policy by reactivating the line immediately after the Dec. 16 spill.

“Obviously the right thing to do is correct the situation and make sure it doesn’t re-occur,” he said. “They must have felt it was a temporary situation and that they would get it corrected as soon as possible.”

Berry has spent more than $800,000 upgrading its equipment at McGrath Lake since the leak, Goehring said. The pumps at the McGrath Lake oil field have been back on line since May.

Nevertheless, the company is seeking to minimize its liability, having filed claims against six agencies, arguing that each had ignored early reports of the spill made by citizens before Christmas Day.

Berry attorneys filed claims against the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, Oxnard police and fire departments, the California Highway Patrol, California Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Channel Islands Harbor Patrol for failing to immediately respond to early reports of the spill from campers or other citizens.

“It made a tremendous difference in the cost and where the oil went because of the lack of reporting,” Goehring said.

The various agencies have all denied the claims, but lawyers for Berry Petroleum still may file suit to recoup some of its losses, Goehring said. Negotiations in those cases are ongoing.

Reiser and others said the fact that some public response agencies failed to follow up early reports of the spill does not mitigate Berry Petroleum’s responsibility.

The oil company has made some headway restoring the McGrath Lake habitat to its natural state, according to records filed with the California Coastal Commission.

A letter to the commission dated July 5 states that Berry consultants have succeeded in rebuilding many of the dunes affected by the spill, and that various plants “have re-invaded this area and are actively growing under jute netting.”

They also created new breeding areas for migrating snowy plovers, and replaced most of the oil-tainted dirt with clean soil, the letter said.

But information in the Coastal Commission application for a restoration permit concedes several other points, including an admission that the company has no inventory of its own transfer pipeline systems.

“Bush has no data regarding most of the pipelines which may be located on the property,” attorney Marc L. Charney wrote. “They are considered unregulated.”

All that may change.

A law that goes into effect Jan. 1 requires the state fire marshal to study the fitness and safety of all low-pressure pipelines in California, and could lead to eventual monitoring of those lines.

“You can’t even consider regulation unless you know what you’re dealing with,” said Gavin Payne, chief of staff to state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria), who sponsored the bill as an assemblyman in response to the McGrath Lake spill.

For Bruce Fincher, the legislation is long overdue.

The Ventura electrician spent part of Christmas Eve day last year walking with his son and dog along McGrath State Beach south of the lake. Right away he noticed a strong stench of petroleum, and his dog came back moments later caked in crude oil.

Fincher returned home, washed his mixed breed named Wilbur and called his local officials.

“I thought my so-called obligation was satisfied,” he said. “I had contacted our authorities, then I find out it had gone on 24 hours without any response.”

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McGrath Lake Oil Spill A Bush Oil Co. pipeline ruptured four days before Christmas, 1993, leaking 84,000 gallons of crude oil into McGrath Lake. A year later, oily residue remains in the sediment of the lake.