As cleanup continued on the shore, some beaches in Laguna Beach reopened Friday, though the public still can’t go in the water. So far the impact on wildlife has been minimal - 10 dead birds and another 25 recovered alive and treated - but environmentalists caution the long-term impacts could be much greater. Local health officials said Friday that air samples from areas where oil potentially spread are within background levels - in other words, similar to air quality on a typical day - and below California health standards for the pollutants that were measured. The oil has spread southeast along the coast with reports of small amounts coming ashore in San Diego County, some 50 miles from the original site. The Coast Guard said about 5,500 gallons of crude have been recovered from the ocean. While the size of the spill isn’t known, the Coast Guard on Thursday slightly revised the parameters of the estimates to at least about 25,000 gallons and no more than 132,000 gallons (500,000 liters). Reports of a possible spill off Huntington Beach were first coming out Friday evening but the leak wasn’t discovered until Saturday morning. When a pipeline is hit by an anchor or other heavy object “that typically results in physical damage that may lead to a fracture,” he said. Adams, president of Houston-based Interface Consulting International, said in an email that the slight bow in the line displayed in one video “doesn’t necessarily look like anchor damage.” But, if that is true, why didn’t the pipeline leak” earlier?įrank G.
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“The shape of the crack indicates that it was caused by internal pressures in the pipeline. This process can bring even more questions,” Bea said. “The results from the analyses need to be validated - corroborated.
Investigators, however, are expected to consider other forces that could have moved and damaged the pipe, including water currents of movement in the seabed. Robert Bea, an engineering professor at UC Berkeley and former Shell Oil engineer, said the second video appears to show a furrow in the seabed created by a dragging anchor leading to the damaged pipeline.
An earlier video showcased a thin, 13-inch long rupture in the line. In 2003, a 7,000 pound anchor was found about 10 feet from a small spill on a Shell Oil pipeline in the Gulf.Ī Coast Guard video released Thursday appears to show a trench in the sandy seafloor leading to a bend in the submerged line, but experts offered varied opinions of the significance of the brief, grainy shots. During 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, a 30,000-pound anchor was dragged by a drifting drilling rig over a Texaco pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico, causing a dent that broke open when the line was later re-started. In others the evidence of an anchor strike was obvious. The leak fouled beaches and killed seabirds.Īt least 17 accidents on pipelines carrying crude oil or other hazardous liquids have been linked to anchor strikes or suspected anchor strikes since 1986, according to an Associated Press review of more than 10,000 reports submitted to federal regulators.Īccording to federal records, in some cases an anchor strike is never conclusively proven, such as 2012 leak from an ExxonMobil pipeline in Louisiana’s shallow Barataria Bay, where a direct strike by a barge or other boat also were considered possibilities. Pipeline strike may have happened months before spill
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