Archive for month: May, 2015

There are many critters particularly at risk with this oil spill.  While our historic worry/focus has been on our rocky intertidal communities and on warm fuzzies (such as these cute marine mammals and endangered sand-nesting birds), other critters are at risk too.  In particular the animals dwelling in the swash zone of our sandy beaches.  What I am most worried about here are the sand crabs (Emerita analoga) that are the food for a huge number of beach-dwelling birds and animals and our California grunion (Leuresthes tenuis).

Sand crabs make their living migrating up and down the beach with the tides (they live in the sand, sticking up their food-collectors to harvest their planktonic food and the waves wash over their sand-home), keeping themselves right at the swash zone where the waves hit.  That’s right where all these tarballs are washing up.  As of yesterday, we have been finding dead sand crabs in amongst the freshest wave of tarballs arriving on our beaches in Ventura County.

It is too early to say if we are seeing a significant mortality event within our sand crab population, but it is concerning that we are seeing so many dead guys (not mere cast-off exoskeletons or dead juveniles).

 

Given the fact that sand crab numbers have been low this year prior to the onset of the pipeline break/oil spill, any tar-induced mortality might prove harmful to the population and sandy beach community overall.  The bright side of this is that these are resilient and highly variable populations and we may see no effect.

 

When it comes to California grunion, the worry is that we are in peak spawning time.  These amazing fish swim up to the beach at night to lay their eggs before rolling and flopping back into the water.  Their eggs chill out in the sand until they are ready to hatch with the next series of high tides.

 

Both sand crabs and grunion are vulnerable to both the toxic oil and the clean-up process alike.  Simply skimming the oil off the very uppermost surface of the sand is not an issue, but digging into the sand translates into possibly digging into these guys and killing them.  Clean-up crews need to be as careful as is reasonable.

See this e-mail from our queen grunion champion Dr. Karen Martin:

Whatever their source may be, these tar balls have the potential to impact beach and nearshore animals and plants, including the California Grunion…

[the impacted areas] are known spawning locations for the California Grunion, an endemic, iconic marine species. Any eggs still on shore this weekend are ready to hatch and likely to emerge during the high tides at night over the past and next few days. However, the tar balls in the intertidal zone are very nearly in the location of the band of buried grunion eggs.

With all appropriate  human safety precautions, when cleaning the beaches, it is important to leave the sand as undisturbed as possible if the contamination is only at the surface. The best practice seems to be gentle manual removal of the surface petroleum, with flat shovels or hand rakes. Some people are using cat-litter scoops.

We are still in the midst of the peak spawning season for the California Grunion. The full moon Tuesday June 2 will be followed by nights with potential runs on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Grunion usually spawn multiple times over their lifespans. It is rare that they die during spawning runs. If you do see an unusual mortality event, please let me know as soon as possible…

…Please recall that after this week the nests of eggs will be present on shore for the following two weeks. Keeping vehicles and other forms of disturbance above the high tide line of Tuesday’s highest tide is the best way to protect them.

Thanks for your care of our beaches and natural resources during this difficult time.

 

Holy cow!  It has been a crazy day.  One of our teams sampling Haskell’s Beach (near the Bacara Resort) north Coal Oil Point was basically given the boot.  Various clean-up teams are now sweeping the beaches from El Capitan to Goleta and the Incident Command has now shut down public access to all of those beaches. This is a huge expansion of the closure area and seems to confirm our concerns beginning mid last week that much of the oil arriving to beaches down to Coal Oil Point was indeed pipeline crude and not merely regular, background tar seep deposition.

While one of our teams checking Carpinteria found nothing particularly abnormal about the tar balls there at 4pm today, we now have reports of dime-to-baseball sized tar balls washing up on several of our monitoring beaches here in our own backyards in Ventura County.  It is unclear if this is related to the spill, but we RARELY IF EVER get this kind of tarring on these beaches.  This is certainly an unusual event and seems very suspicious.  We need to have the fingerprinting of the oil to confirm but at a minimum, this is very weird.

Here is a quick video by Paul Spaur summarizing the goings on before the beach was closed:

 

We will post more when we know more.

From the LA Times about 15 minutes ago:

The cleanup response to the oil spill that fouled miles of beaches along the Santa Barbara County coast will now extend to Ventura County, where tar balls have been spotted on beaches, officials said Friday.

The pipeline’s owners said it will dispatch cleanup contractors to Hollywood, McGrath and San Buenaventura beaches in Ventura County, though federal authorities have not confirmed whether the oil there is from the spill.

“Until we know more, we will act as if it is related to our incident,” said Rick McMichael, senior director of operations at Plains All American Pipeline, which operates the pipeline.

read the full story on the LA Times website.

Workers continue to clean the shoreline at Refugio State Beach in Santa Barbara County after a crude oil pipeline ruptured on May 19, spilling thousands of gallons into the ocean. Photo: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Ventura County Star Website:

By Friday afternoon, crews were cleaning up tar balls at San Buenaventura and McGrath.

Two beaches north of Santa Barbara, also in the Channel Coast district, were closed last week after an estimated 21,000 gallons of oil spilled into the ocean off Refugio State Beach. There’s no indication the tar balls on the Ventura beaches were related to that spill nearly 50 miles away. But officials don’t know where they came from at this point.

“An initial analysis came back inconclusive as to what the source is,” said Kevin McGowan, manager of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services. The Emergency Operations Center has been activated to support the investigation and cleanup efforts.

McGowan was with a team early Friday checking out the sites where the oil was reported.

“They range from the size of a dime or a quarter to a dinner plate,” he said. “Stretches (of the tar balls) span anywhere from 10 to 50 feet long.”

No closures were reported Friday afternoon.

“There doesn’t appear to be a significant threat to public health or wildlife in Ventura County at this point,” said Chris Stephens, the county’s resource management director. “Our goal at this point is to find the oil, remove it and mitigate any environmental impact it may have caused.”

Those responding to Ventura-area beaches Friday would assess whether the tar balls need to be cleaned up. County officials said cleanup teams had been deployed to the area.

A fly-over of the ocean done as part of the cleanup efforts of the Santa Barbara County oil spill was expected to include the Ventura County area Friday. McGowan said he had not yet heard the results from Unified Command, but so far, there were no reports of oil in the water off the Ventura coast.

Earlier this week, a 7-mile stretch of coastline along Santa Monica Bay was closed after globs of oily goo washed ashore. Officials said the area might reopen Friday after a two-day cleanup effort.

 

Update: 6:30pm

My students are reporting lots and lots of small to medium-sized tar balls washing up on western Ventura County Beaches.  These tar balls are dense enough to begin forming a line of tar at the strand / high tide line.  We are also seeing dead sand crabs (one of the foci of our sandy beach work and a keystone species for sandy beach ecology) intermixed at this tar sand line at McGrath State Beach and Emma Wood State Beach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a quick tour of our PIRatE Lab’s lab.  We have been getting several requests about our lab and decided to give you a sense of our set-up.

 

 

We’ve also had lots of questions about oil; what it looks like, what it smells like, and how sticky it is.  We have posted our observations about oil before, but here is what the samples look like back in the lab: