California State of Emergency: Up To 105,000 Gallons of Oil Spill in Santa Barbara from Plains All American Pipeline
Up to 105,000 gallons of oil obtained via offshore drilling have spilled from a pipeline owned by Plains All American at Refugio State Beach in Santa Barbara County in California. At least 21,000 gallons have poured into the Pacific Ocean and the spill’s impacts stretch nine miles, according to the Associated Press.
As a result, California Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency in Santa Barbara County, which he said in a press statement “cuts red tape and helps the state quickly mobilize all available resources.”
“The 11-mile Plains American Coastal Pipeline connects Exxon’s Las Flores Canyon facility – which provides basic processing for crude produced from California’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) – to Plain’s larger Line 63 pipeline system,” the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) explained in a blog post. “[T]his incident demonstrates the real risks associated with industry plans to inundate California’s coastal waters, pipelines, rail lines and refineries with tar sands crudes.”
The spill, reminding some of the much-bigger 1969 Santa Barbara offshore oil spill, comes just several months after the Environmental Defense Center filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) for secretly permitting offshore hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the deepwater areas off the coast of California. Both ExxonMobiland the American Petroleum Institute issued motions to intervene as co-defendants in that case, which the judge granted.
Photo Credit: Greenpeace USA
“This spill shows, yet again, that safe and responsible oil and gas drilling are myths,” Marissa Knodel, climate campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said in press release. “Despite these terrible impacts, the Obama administration wants to open up new areas for drilling, which presents a dangerous and unjust risk to the homes and livelihoods of coastal communities,
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