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The
Department of Justice said the indictment alleges that the
companies, which own and operate the 17-mile (27 km) San Pedro
Bay Pipeline, failed to properly respond to eight alarms over
more than 13 hours on October 1-2.
The indictment also accuses Amplify and its Beta Operating Co
LLC and San Pedro Bay Pipeline Co subsidiaries of shutting and
restarting the pipeline five times after the first five alarms
were triggered, sending oil flowing through the damaged pipeline
for more than three hours.
Amplify said it investigated the pipeline but it was then not
known to the crew that the leak detection system was
malfunctioning.
The detection system was "wrongly signaling a potential leak at
the platform where no leak could be detected by the platform
personnel and where no leak was actually occurring," it said in
a statement.
The oil spill left fish dead, birds mired in petroleum and
wetlands contaminated, in what local officials called an
environmental catastrophe.
An estimated 25,000 gallons of crude oil were discharged from a
point approximately 4.7 miles west of Huntington Beach from a
crack in the 16-inch pipeline, the statement said.
An earlier report by the Associated Press showed how the spill
was not investigated for nearly 10 hours.
(Reporting by Seher Dareen in Bengaluru; Editing by Leslie Adler
and Stephen Coates)
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