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 As much as 2,500 barrels (105,000 gallons) of crude oil was
released in Tuesday's rupture, according to a "worst-case scenario"
presented by the pipeline company, five times more than was
initially estimated.
Plains All American Pipeline <PAA.N> said it calculated that up to a
fifth of the total spill had reached the ocean.
The 24-inch-wide pipeline, which runs underground parallel to a
coastal highway west of Santa Barbara, inexplicably burst late on
Tuesday morning, belching crude oil down a canyon, under a culvert
and onto Refugio State Beach before it flowed into the Pacific, U.S.
Coast Guard officials said.
Plains Chief Executive Officer Greg Armstrong told an evening news
conference that pipeline pressure irregularities were detected by
control-room operators at about 11 a.m. on Tuesday, and the line was
shut off in about 30 minutes.
Company spokesman Brad Leone acknowledged that residual oil in the
pipeline continued to drain for some period after the shutdown. The
spill was discovered about an hour later, when people in the area
noticed a petrochemical odor and alerted authorities, officials
said.
By Wednesday, a 4-mile (6-km) stretch of beach was blackened, and an
oil slick spanned more than 9 miles (14 km) of the ocean, the Coast
Guard said.
 It appeared to surpass the size of an offshore rupture in 1997 that
dumped up to 1,000 barrels of crude into the Santa Barbara Channel,
about 125 miles (200 km) northwest of Los Angeles, said Kevin Drude,
deputy energy director of the county's Planning and Development
Department.
That spill, and Tuesday's accident, pale in comparison with the
estimated 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil that gushed into the
channel from an offshore oil-well blowout in 1969 and stands as the
largest oil spill ever in California waters.
Drude and officials from conservation groups said Tuesday's oil
spill - if Plains' estimates hold up - likely ranks as the largest
along the Southern California coast since the 1969 Santa Barbara
blowout, which killed thousands of sea birds and other wildlife and
helped spark the modern U.S. environmental movement.
SENSITIVE NESTING SITES
Janet Wolf, who chairs the Santa Barbara County Board of
Supervisors, called the latest spill "a disaster" and "a
worst-nightmare scenario."
Governor Jerry Brown issued an emergency proclamation to speed
needed cleanup resources to the scene, saying, "We will do
everything necessary to protect California's coastline."
The spill zone lies at the edge of a national marine sanctuary and
state-designated underwater preserve that is home to 25 marine
mammal species and 60 species of sea birds. But the Santa Barbara
Channel and surrounding waters are also dotted with nearly two dozen
oil platforms and hundreds of wells.
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Wildlife teams were dispatched to rescue any birds, marine mammals
and other animals injured by the spill. Authorities said the extent
of wildlife damage was not immediately known, but photos showed
oil-covered pelicans and other sea life washed ashore.
Crews focused on three especially sensitive nesting areas for shore
birds, including snowy plovers and least terns, a state Fish and
Wildlife Department spokeswoman said.
Refugio State Beach and El Capitan State Beach, both popular seaside
camping destinations, were to remain closed to the public through
the Memorial Day holiday weekend, officials said. The area was also
closed to fishing and shellfish harvesting.
Some 300 cleanup workers on the beach were scooping up globs of oil
from the sand, raking tar balls and disposing of the material in
plastic bags.
Crews will also scrub soiled rocks, hose down contaminated areas and
skim oil left behind, Coast Guard Captain Jennifer Williams told
reporters in nearby Goleta.
Nine cleanup vessels plied the ocean, six to corral the slick with
booms and three others skimming oil from the surface.
The pipeline that burst on Tuesday typically carries about 1,200
barrels of oil an hour from an Exxon Mobil <XOM.N> processing
facility to a distribution hub in Bakersfield hundreds of miles
away, company and county officials said.
The company said an internal inspection of the pipeline was
conducted a few weeks ago but results had not yet come back.
(Writing and additional reporting from Los Angeles by Steve Gorman;
Additional reporting by Rory Carroll in San Francisco; Editing by
Lisa Lambert, Peter Cooney and Ken Wills)
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