Water feels heavy today
ExxonMobile has been hoping to continue to drill away at three of their offshore platforms on the Santa Barbara Coast but their emergency application to
truck their oil to refineries was just rejected.
A Santa Barbara County official said the company's problem did not constitute an emergency and it could go through the normal procedure to get a permit to truck oil.
ExxonMobil had significantly cut production from the three rigs after the Plains All American Pipeline spilled crude on the coast May 19 and was shut down. Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Santa Barbara County due to the effects of the spill.
It's been over a month since an Plains All American's oil pipeline spilled somewhere in the ballpark of
101,000 gallons of crude oil on the Santa Barbara Coast. It's been almost 3 weeks since federal regulators revealed that the pipeline
rupture occurred along a section of the pipeline that was badly,
externally corroded.
The findings indicate that over 80 percent of the metal pipe wall had worn away over time because of corrosion, said Richard Kuprewicz, president of Accufacts Inc., which investigates pipeline incidents.
"There is pipe that can survive 80 percent wall loss. When you're over 80 percent, there isn't room for error at that level," said Kuprewicz, who cautioned that it's still too soon to determine what caused the pipe to fail.
Just over a week before the spill, Plains All American Pipeline's inspectors had told a different story about the corrosion of the pipeline.
The agency documents said findings by metallurgists who examined the pipe wall thickness at the break site conflicted with the results of inspections conducted on that area of pipe on May 5 for operator Plains All American Pipeline. Those inspections pinpointed a 45 percent loss of wall thickness in the area of the pipe break, meaning they concluded the pipe was in far better condition.
Plains All American might ring a bell. They paid out a paltry $3.25 million in civil penalty in a settlement with the EPA a few years back. Paltry is the word when you
know the violations.
On 10 occasions between June 2004 and September 2007, approximately 6,510 barrels (273,420 gallons) of crude oil were discharged from various pipelines and one tank owned and operated by Plains into navigable waters or adjoining shorelines in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Kansas, in violation of Clean Water Act (CWA) sections 311(b)(3) and 301(a).
Why don't we slow down guys and make sure things are sorta kinda safe?