Tag Archive for: instructor-sean.anderson

A few distinct, but unrelated experiences have brought the issue of plastic balloons in the ocean into frequent conversation this week.

Balloons trash our beaches. Image from BalloonsBlow.

Scorpion Cove Beach on the foggy early morning of September 18, 2016.  This section of Santa Cruz Island is owned by Channel Islands National Park.

It began with last Saturday’s annual California Coastal Cleanup Day.  I happened to be out on Santa Cruz Island with my son’s Boy Scout Troop.  Our 30 scouts made quick work of the debris on this cobble beach, ultimately cleaning up just over 2.6 kg (5.6 lbs.) of garbage off the comparatively clean beach that afternoon.  Our cleanup was one of nearly 1,000 such beaches targeted for cleanup by anti-trash volunteers across the Golden State.  While we had a grand total of zero balloons recovered on that Santa Cruz Island survey, our Island Packers boat twice paused on our way out to the island earlier that morning to recover two separate balloons floating in the Santa Barbara Channel.  Our cleanup, the boat recovery, and a microplastics beach demonstration I ran for our scouts later that weekend all drove a series of discussions of both plastics generally and balloons in particular.

Beach trash picked cleaned from Scorpion Cove on Santa Cruz Island, September 17, 2016. Weight totaled 2.6 kg (5.6 lbs).  No balloons here, but this got everyone thinking…

The pervious week saw my wife order me into the waters off of Balboa Island to get a floating balloon because “that’s what you do.”  And then two days ago came a call from the Ventura County Star’s Colleen Cason asking about balloons (who had been similarly motivated to think about balloons by a brief balloon-motivated detour on a trip out to the Channel Islands last weekend).  Check out Colleen’s piece here.

As almost all of these recent balloon-in-the-sea conversations have me repeating the same things over and over, I suddenly realized a little summary for anyone interested in such party pollution might be in order.

Dead Black-footed Albatross entangled in latex balloons and cotton string on Zmudowski Beach, California. Image: C.Miller/P. Brown (BeachCOMBERS).

Types of Balloons

Most of the balloons we encounter in our daily lives fall into one of two categories:

Latex or Mylar? Image: balloonsgalore.

Latex

Latex balloons are created from rubber.  That rubber can be either synthetic (created from polymerizing a monomer such as isoprene, generally deprived from natural gas or crude oil) or natural (milked from trees of the genus Hevea, a Euphorb).  The traditional term “India rubber” refers to natural latex harvested from Hevea trees, especially the Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis).  Even “natural” latex is usually altered chemically before being turned into commercial rubber balloon fodder.  Most often this treatment is via a vulcanization process (i.e. curing) wherein that natural latex is baked to crosslink the existing polymer with additional compounds (most typically sulphur) and in so doing alter some of the compound’s chemical properties.  In the case of balloons, this vulcanization serves to make the rubber smoother, more pliable, and less sticky.  Latex rubber balloons break down comparatively quickly in the environment, especially when that rubber is thin-walled and exposed to prolonged, strong sunlight/UV and high heat such as under a midday summer sun.

Mylar

“Mylar” is a trade name for metal-coated poly(ethylene terephthalate) or PET, created for NASA’s space program.  Metalized PET was first used by NASA in their 1964 Echo II balloon satellite project.  Most of our current commercial balloons are actually made of Biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate (BoPET), a polyester film made from stretching PET.  The BoPET is covered on one site with polyethylene for improve puncture resistance and on the other by aluminum (or another metal) for a maximally reflective surface.  These coverings also allow the balloons to be heat sealed (something not possible with “pure” PET itself).  These coatings act to make the material stronger and more durable, but consequently harder to break down once their short product lifespan is over.  In such discussions of balloons by the less chemically or industry savvy, you will find “Mylar,” “polyethylene,” “PET,” and “foil balloon” used more or less interchangeably.  In addition to Mylar, Melinex and Hostaphan are other common trade names you might see for equivalent materials.

How does this Mylar Stuff go away?

“Away” is always a relative term.  Philosophical musings aside, a better question might be “How do plastic balloons decompose?”

Mylar is one type of plastic.  And most of our modern plastics are essentially long chains of repeating carbon (what chemists call “organic”) molecules. We “decompose” plastic by both breaking up those long, repeating chemical chains and by chemically turning those building blocks into some other compound.  We have essentially four options to do that:

photodegradation

Alteration of the plastic material via exposure to light, especially UV light.

thermo oxidative degradation

Alteration of the plastic material via heating up the plastic in the presence of oxygen.

hydrolytic degradation

Alteration of the plastic material via heating up the plastic in the presence water.

biodegradation

Alteration of the plastic material via feeding the plastic to microbes capable of eating carbon scaffolding and dealing with the various reactive chemical groups.

Degradation in the ocean

Consistently, the next question I’ll get asked is “how long does it take to break down Mylar.”  And I always disappoint with the classically annoying professorial retort “it depends.”  In reality some in the plastics industry would have you believe that Mylar simply “breaks down” quickly.  Unfortunately, this is a very slow process in practice.  Much slower than the break down of latex, for example.  In practice pure PET will probably take at least many months to a year or more to start significantly falling apart, albeit yellowing and an increase in brittleness can being within minutes of exposure to strong sunlight.  In practice the coatings, especially the metalized outer surface, act to shield the inner core plastic.  Add to that these balloons are in the ocean where water temperature acts as a thermal insulator keeping the plastic from ever getting as hot as it otherwise would.  Again that metal foils (sorry, too good an opportunity for a pun) microbial activity as well by shielding the internal “tasty” plastic from the microbes most able to eat and subsequently degrade it.

On the positive side, the balloon material will be exposed to potentially elevated physical trauma if the ocean is choppy or the balloon is being bashed into the intertidal.  But again, this will act to breakup the aggregate balloon into small pieces, but not chemically transform it per se.

What should we do with our Mylar waste?

Ultimately synthetic plastics such as Mylar have few responsible fates, with the best course to minimize the production/use of the material in the first place.  But as we seem to love our Mylar, I have ranked the possible fates in order from least to most preferable.

Contaminate our planet

Obviously a horrible idea.  The vast majority of released balloons ultimately end up in waterways and the global ocean.  See my section on risks below.

Burning

Combusting materials definitely gets rid of the physical mass, but this merely converts a solid waste problem into a gaseous waste problem.  In the process you typically generate things none of us should be breathing.

Landfill

The most common, “least bad” of the poor alternatives.  This is just what it sounds like.

Recycle

Properly collected plastics can occasionally be recycled, assuming a local waste collector has the proper fiscal incentives and technology.  Most of the guides out there rapidly default to talking about the PET core of Mylar and note that regular PET is recyclable.  But recall our Mylar is PET plus other stuff (especially that dang metal coating).  When it comes to recycling (and particularly when it comes to recycling of low profit margin items like plastic), contaminants are the key consideration.  When the material supply is homogeneous, recycling proceeds quickly and yields a high quality ending material that can reenter the production cycle for yet another life.  But with each impurity the technical and chemical challenge grows and the meager profits shrink.  In practice most sources seem to quickly segway into discussions of repurposing or down cycling Mylar balloons.  For example, Recycle Scene suggests getting crafty and using old Mylar balloons for bird deterring flash strips.

What risks do floating balloons pose?

Initially we are talking about threats from the physical structure of the ballon (entanglement and ingestion).  We have little direct evidence of acute or chronic toxicity of this plastic to individuals post-ingestion, but the ubiquity of this material and sheer additional volume entering the seas daily make this an increasingly likely potential impact.  My colleagues and I as well as labs across the planet are actively working on this now (California is becoming something of a hotbed for marine debris research).  Stay tuned for more info on that story.

Entanglement

Essentially anything can get potentially get entangled by a flotsam balloon.  Most commonly we hear of larger animals such as seals and sea lions bound with plastic, but this is a risk to any oceanic creature (NOAA documents 200 species).  I have occasionally seen balloons and/or functionally similar plastic bag waste wrapped in kelp canopies, gorgonian fans, and coral heads, showing sessile organisms are impacted by this waste as are the more conspicuous mobile critters.

Turtle eating plastic. Image: coastal care.org.

Ingestion

Essentially here we are talking about floating objects that can occasionally resemble jellyfish.  The organisms that ingest jellies are most at risk here; sea turtles, ocean sunfish (Mola mola), and the like.  Other critters will occasionally ingest them (e.g. tuna) or attempt to use them as structural elements (e.g. albatross nests).  When ingested, balloons can obstruct digestive tracts and pose a great risk to the animal in question of a painful, drawn out death via starvation.

Fragments of a blue latex balloon found in the stomach of green turtle stranded dead near Blackpool, UK.  Image: Rod Penrose, Marine Environmental Monitoring, UK CSIP.

Are oceanic balloons a big problem?

Not exactly.  Our most recent surveys of Channel Island and California mainland beaches (Miller, et al. 2016) show latex and mylar balloons combined total a mere 0.01% of the total weight of material washing onto our southern California beaches.  So the problem of balloons in the sea is not that big in relative terms.  Yes there are (literally) tons of balloons washing into or landing upon the surface of our seas daily, but that ultimately pales in significance to the many orders of magnitude greater stream of waste entering our ocean, much of which is plastic.

So we shouldn’t care about balloons?

No way!  We should indeed care about these items!

Balloons are fantastic “gateway plastics” that provide a perfect starting point for educating the general public about our plastic-based consumer culture generally and marine debris in particular.  We all know exactly what a ballon is, where it came from and how it was used.  Additionally, the high visibility, shiny metallic surface of a Mylar balloon floating on the surface of the ocean is much more readily detectable than the more numerous, problematic, and ubiquitous microfibers floating through our waters or clear plastic bags floating just subsurface.  Each balloon we pick up is a teaching opportunity.  An example to learn about plastic and a opportunity to educate yourself about non-ballon alternatives (try surfing on over to the BalloonsBlow, for example).

Importantly, balloon waste is also something clearly within our wheelhouse.  It is all too easy to blame some amorphous greedy industry polluter or faceless profiteer for our waste stream.  But who is to blame for the ballon that says “Happy 5th Birthday Sally?”  That would be you and me.  Change always starts in the mirror.  And Mylar balloons are a pretty damn shiny surface.

Additional References:

A few links to some of our ongoing research into plastic pollution:

Michaela Miller’s ESRM Capstone research on marine debris (2016).

Popular press articles about our collective work on plastics:

Dorothy Horn’s work on the ubiquity of microplastics in sandy beach ecosystems.  Ventura County Star, September 2015.

Clare Steele’s work beginning to the synthesize our coastal plastics work.  VC Reporter, February 2016.

Colleen Cason’s story on Mylar balloons in the Santa Barbara Channel.  Ventura County Star, September 2016.

Cason Point Column from Ventura County Star page B1. Sunday, September 25, 2016.

Other related blog entries:

More plastics…  February 2016.

Plastic Education.  February 2016.

Dorothy Horn’s Microplastic Research Overview.  August 2016.

Michaela Miller’s Marine Debris Research Overview.  April 2016.

Every two years the Olympic Games roll around and we are treated to endless commentary and an amazingly small amount of actual sport (at least on NBC Universal Channels that have a stranglehold on U.S. broadcasts via their $7.75 billion contract).  Outside of the NBC hype machine, we have seen a pattern in recent years of news stories critiquing almost every aspect of the host city’s Olympic endeavor in the lead-up to the opening ceremonies.  From exposés on the displacement of marginalized peoples for new infrastructure to massive budget overruns to illegal and institutionalized drug doping by athletes, these investigations often question the logic and raison d’être of the entire Olympic endeavor.  Of particular interest is the rising sub-genre of environmental quality reporting generally focused on athlete-relevant or visiting reporter-relevant environmental quality (see for example what happened in Beijing and Sochi).  Rarely do these concerns survive the lighting of the Olympic Flame.  But this year might be different.  This year we have data.  Lots and lots of environmental quality data.  And it paints a pretty disappointing picture.

Rio de Janeiro’s aquatic Olympic venues.  Figure: The Washington Post in 2015.

The Promise in 2009

When the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2016 Summer Games to Rio de Janeiro in 2009 on the heels of FIFA’s 2007 announcement of Brazil winning the 2014 World Cup, it seemed to be Brazil’s coming out of sorts as a global socioeconomic heavy hitter.  As the “B” star of the new axis of emerging “BRIC” economies that were predicted to rewrite the global order of things, Brazil was seen as finally coming into its own.  This was to be something of a culmination of the forces at work since the mid 1990s.  Brazil had their “of the people” champion in President Lula da Silva who sought to lift the masses of Brazilian poor out of poverty, had become a global agricultural superpower in everything from beef to soy, was the 12^th largest oil producer in the world, and seemed to be making headway reconciling its horrid racial divisions within the context of a burgeoning democracy in the global south.

Coastal Brazil incarnate.  Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay and Sugarloaf Mountain.  Image: Medium.

Everyone knew the coastal and inland waters were bad, with Guanabara Bay the epicenter of concern for the 2016 Olympics.  At the time the Brazilian government committed to “regenerate Rio’s magnificent waterways” via new, permanent sanitary infrastructure.  The much-lauded, maverick billionare businessman Eike Batista pledged some of his then-immense personal fortune for both some of the initial cleaning and to help jumpstart those associated improvements.  Later this morphed into a consortium of the Dutch government, several Brazilian and international environmental NGOs, and various other Rio business interests proposing holistic solutions to Guanabara Bay’s pollution.  It was very heady stuff.  Their solution would eventually morph into the Clean Urban Delta Initiative and span an array of more than 20 sub-plans, each with more narrowly targeted outcomes ranging from temporary skimming of floating plastic to the installation of treatment wetlands sized to clean those waste streams prior to their discharge into the ocean.

But that was a long time ago.  And then, you know.  Reality set in.

Brazil in Summer 2016

Here in August 2016, Rio de Janeiro and Brazil as a whole look nothing like the hope engendered a decade ago.  The Brazil of the summer of 2016 is a country of crippling recession, seemingly ever-expanding crime waves, and growing distrust between police forces and the poor residents of flavelas (à la Baton Rouge).  Add in a huge dose of Zika virus-induced fear.  Then top it off with the landmark “carwash” (Operação Lava Jato in Portuguese) corruption scandal that has already removed the President from office, seemingly touched nearly all of the major politicians across Brazil, and retrograded federal environmental policy to more corporate-friendly policies from the pre-Lula era.

All of this translates into a tempest of distraction for those hoping to improve the fetid coastal environment of Rio’s shores.  There has simply been no bandwidth or fiscal wherewithal to resolve these issues.  Environmental concerns have become a very low priority for local, state, and federal authorities alike.  The Mayor of Rio is out of money, the state and federal governments are paralyzed by the scandal, and that billionaire who ranked as the eighth richest person in the world in 2012 is broke and being prosecuted for numerous counts of insider trading (his net worth may be into the NEGATIVE billions of dollars at least check).

Rio de Janeiro: 2016’s Olympic Home

Copacabana Beach in a rare people-free moment.  Image: Adam Jones.

This coastal city’s most recognized landmarks include the Christ the Redeemer statue towering high above the cityscape and the iconic sandy beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.  But the more significant landscape element for our story today is the massive human population at the heart of this megacity.  Rio de Janeiro’s roughly 6.5 million residents make it the second most populous city in Brazil and sixth largest in the Americas.  More than one-fifth (1.4 million) of these residents reside within the network of flavelas sprinkled across the hillsides and former wetlands buffering the urban core.  And the problem isn’t merely a favela issue; a 2015 survey reported 3.6 million people across 100 Brazilian cities lacked even rudimentary connections to sewer systems.  These haphazard, unplanned shanty towns have little to no functioning municipal sewage systems, with most dumping raw sewage into the waterways that in turn dump into ocean.  This waste stream compounds the already horrible state of waste collection and treatment across the city.  Amongst other things, this has produced a massive coastal water quality crisis whose growth paralleled the rise of this recently-robust economy.

Rio Favela Facts

Rio’s Water Quality

The day before the opening ceremony, Rio’s coastal waters are not the kind of places you want your kids splashing about in.  Rather they are ripe with “raw” human waste, garbage, human viruses and fecal indicator bacteria, according to a 16-month-long Associated Press study widely circulated last week.

The AP ran simple coliform and DNA/RNA Virus Mini Kit assays as well are more sophisticated viral counts and quantitative PCR at various olympic and paraolympic venues hosting rowing, kayaking, canoeing, sailing, and (gulp!) open water swimming.  These methods gave them the basic “quick and dirty” water quality parameters that are pretty standard across most of the world, with generally accepted critical points for health concerns and management triggers.

AP’s Rio water quality testing locations in the lead-up to the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

In brief, the fractured and half-hearted Brazilian attempts at infrastructure improvement and pollution abatement have come home to roost.  For example, most of the 17 pollution screening efforts are fractured and ineffectual, sewage treatment plants are operating well below their operating capacity with plants not even necessarily plumbed into the sewage system, and then there are the dead bodies just dropped on the beaches (where everyone gets to play volleyball in a week).  Brazilian TV reported that about 8,200 liters of untreated sewage flow into Guanabara Bay EACH SECOND.  Merged with that AP data, this means ingesting three teaspoons of bay water would produce a “99 %” chance of infection.  The Atlantic reported back in in March 7 to 9% of sailors were getting sick while practicing in the Bay, a rate that the International Sailing Federation has argued is acceptable (but exceeds the U.S. EPA maximum illness rate for swimming, 3.6%).

Rio’s Olympic Water Quality

This is data is compiled from the summary report published July 2016 by the Associated Press. Monitoring locations were sprinkled across various Olympic venue sites in Guanabara Bay. Full data were not provided and so this emphasizes the max and minimum values based on geography. I have provided relevant reference levels to make interpretation of these values easier for the non-expert.

Waste litters the water as two sailors prepare for a training session at Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay.  Image: AFP/Getty Images.

A body floats in the waters of Guanabara Bay, a sailing venue for the 2016 Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Image: NY Times.

The edge of Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay.  Image: AP.

The pollutants lurking in these waters are a who’s who of everything you might expect from a modern megacity and international port:

• heavy metals: copper, lead, and the other usual suspects
• persistent organic compounds: especially pesticides and environmental estrogens
• excessive nutrients: especially nitrogen and phosphorus (in turn driving localized eutrophication and fish kills)
• contaminants of emerging concern: generally industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals with biological activity at exceedingly low concentrations (in the parts per million or parts per billion range)
• marine debris & suspended materials: wood, tires, plastic, etc.
  • macro- and micro-plastics: while this is actually a subset of the broader debris, our work shows that we need consider plastics separately from other debris categories
• petroleum: mostly coming from unrestricted, non-point discharges into waterways and shipping activity in the harbors and ports
• corpses: dead vertebrates abound in Rio’s waters, including human bodies…enough said

While I can find no direct reported measurements of the following pollution categories, I strongly suspect these are impacting environmental quality in the region based on the gross conditions present in Rio and the background materials I have been reading:

• thermal: water temperature abnormally elevated due to industrial activities, industrial cooling systems, proliferation of impervious surfaces, and urbanization
• sedimentation
• acoustic: excessive noise from coastal vessels and port activity

via GIPHY

The Oil Spills of Rio

We already mentioned the lack of modern sewage treatment as a key stressor of water quality.  We next need to add in good ol’ oil spills and related industrial releases.

Paulo Roberto Costa, a former Petrobras executive, being escorted by police after appearing before a Brazilian congressional committee investigating allegations of corruption.  A Range Rover intended to be a gift to Mr. Costa led police to search his office and eventually to arrest him, and he later cut a deal with prosecutors.  Credit Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters.

The wider world often associates Rio with scantily clad beach goers or folks dancing salsa during Carnival, but rarely associates this port city with oil and gas production.  It is in fact better to conceive of this coastal port as the center of Brazil’s energy sector that it in fact is.  Oil and gas accounted for 13% of the country’s GDP in 2014 (the most recent numbers I could find).  Rio is the engineering and logistics center for the massive push to exploit reserves under deep water salt domes far offshore.  The biggest player here is the state-owned oil company Petrobras, a major part of the unfolding “carwash” corruption scandal ripping apart Brazil this summer.

Unfortunately where we have production, we have spills.  Rio is no exception to this.  Add to this the typical lack of environmental oversight common in “emerging” or “developing” economies.  Most of the oil and gas industry is operating here and across the country without strong environmental permitting.  Environmental concerns take a clear back seat to business concerns.  For instance, we see zero oversight for underground storage tanks, older refineries simply grandfathered into the production chain without serious attention to modernization to either reduce emissions or improve environmental safety, and weak institutional responses from governmental agencies when a mishap does indeed occur.

Comperj, a giant refinery and petrochemical complex built by the state oil company, Petrobras, in Itaboraí, Brazil.  The unfinished project was originally planned to cost $6.1 billion, but a state audit put the price closer to $50 billion.  Image: Andre Vieira for The New York Times.

Here is a brief rundown of a few recent notable oil spills in and around Rio.

Tarik Ibn Ziyad Spill (1975)

Significant spills along Rio’s coast date back to at least March 1975 when the Iraqi-flaged tanker Tarik Ibn Ziyad ripped open and as it was pulling into the Sao Sebastiao terminal at Santos, releasing an estimated 6,000,000 liters (1,585,000 gal., 37,700 bbl) of light crude oil over the next 15 hours into the bay and oiling the outer coastline.  The spill was fairly dramatic with spilled oil catching fire both on the shores of the oiled Island of Fundao and the surface of the Jequia River (home to a biological reserve) wherein an unspecified amount of mangrove forest burned to the water line.  As was so often the case back then, rudimentary monitoring techniques and response capability translated into relatively poor quantification of the impacts of this spill and few details can be found in either English or Portuguese sources.

By the 1990s Brazil’s nascent environmental oversight and assessment capabilities were another story.

Guanabara Bay Spill (1997)

An estimated 2,000,000 liters (528,000 gal., 12,600 bbl) of oil spilled from Petrobras’ pipeline running into their REDUC refinery in 1997, primarily flowing onto the coastline and into coastal waters.  We saw significant oiling of littoral regions and the first big acute toxicity to wetlands and fish communities since the 1970s.  This would set the stage for cascading implosions of Rio’s fishing industry over the ensuing years.  This 1997 spill drove more than half the fisherfolk to seek alternative employment due to collapsed fish stocks and an associated inability to collect enough fish even for subsistence harvest.  It also signaled the first widespread public outcry against oil spills and “business as usual” in the petroleum industry, but in practice almost nothing changed.  It “primed the pump” for the public response to the spill three years later.

Guanabara Bay Spill (2000)

The most ecologically significant spill in the past few decades in the Rio region was arguably the January 2000 Guanabara Bay spill.  In a redux of the 1997 spill, the Petrobras pipeline bringing crude into their REDUC refinery ruptured and released 1,300,000 litres (343,000 gal., 8,200 bbl).  Oil was dispersed widely across the northern and northeastern regions of the bay fouling various islets, rocky beaches, sandy beaches and mangroves.  Acute toxicity was clearly observed as we saw conspicuous die offs within the fringing mangrove community and many fish and invertebrate populations.

Workers clean an oil contaminated beach off Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay in 2000.  Image: AP Photo/Renzo Gostoli.

Quite disturbingly, total Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in seawater sampled at most monitoring stations ten days post-spill were within same range of PAH previously reported for Guanabara Bay (0.05 to 2.97 L^-1).  Fish tissue from two species in the immediate wake of the spill showed no significant elevation in PAH concentrations relative to reference samples from the same sites one year prior to the spill (15.8 to 76.3 µg kg^-1) suggesting no elevated threat to the human health from this particular spill.  One interpretation here was that there was nothing to worry about as we saw no elevated “oil signal” post-spill.  Alternatively, you could read these results with grave concern, interpreting this as a bay so contaminated from day in, day out pollution that even such a massive spill doesn’t elevate exposure or risk.  It was most likely the latter as SCAT surveys post-spill showed that at least 70 km of coastline was heavily oiled.  In addition, coastal sediments showed clearly elevated PAH concentrations (see Gabardo, et al. 2003) relative to pre-spill concentrations.

In 2007, Petrobras was ordered to compensate fishermen $300 million for the loss of their ability to fish due to the outright destruction of the wide range of fish stocks.  Sixteen years post-spill and nine years post court order, no fishermen have yet to see any money.  I can find no evidence of significant ecological recovery of these impacted regions.  Tech Insider reported the current situation of the fishing community last month:

Alex Sandro Santos, the president of the Fishermen Association of Tubiacanga, is a third generation fisherman in the area. Fifty years ago, he says, you could find dolphins swimming in Guanabara Bay. When a Petrobras petroleum plant opened up four decades ago, things started going downhill.

“With the growing population here, everything goes in the bay without treatment,” he told Tech Insider during a visit to Guanabara Bay in 2015.

At the beginning of that year, Santos recalls, a journalist from local publication O Globo threw a red ball into his bathroom toilet. He later found it in the bay.

Most fishermen have second jobs. They’re construction workers, cleaners, and boat renters for tourists on the side. Younger local residents see the dismal future in fishing on the bay and have started looking elsewhere. “There are lots going to deal drugs,” says Sergio.

Chevron Campos Basin Blowout (2011)

In something reminiscent of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, a Chevron-led drilling consortium working the Frade field 120 km northeast of Rio de Janeiro lost containment of their exploratory well in November 2011.  That Campos Basin blowout the ran for four days and released 590,000 liters (156,000 gal., 3,700 bbl) of crude.  Insufficient capping of the wellhead allowed the higher-than-expected wellhead pressures to kick out drill muds and defeat the cementing.  Favorable winds and currents kept oil no closer than 100 km from shore and appear partly responsible for the amazingly low final settlement associated with clean-up/spill.  Chevron shuttered their well for 18 months and ultimately settled with the Brazilian government for $135 million, a considerable “victory” f0r the company considering the government initially asked for $18 billion in damages.  While Chevron was in no way responsible for the failed Olympic-driven efforts to clean up Rio’s waters, such a large settlement could most likely have assisted with several of measures identified in the Clean Urban Delta Initiative.  Brazilian petroleum regulator ANP fined Chevron for failing to follow drilling plans, but absolved the company of negligence.  Given the corruption and payola now swirling around Petrobras, the scuttlebutt at the moment is whether Petrobras’ 30% stake in the Frade consortium played a role in their winning such a light settlement.

Petrobras Pipeline Spill (2015)

June 2015 Petrobras pipeline spill.  Image: AP.

The most recent release in the region was yet another pipeline spill, albeit a very small one.  The June 2015 rupture of a Petrobras pipeline once again doused coastal wetlands in an estimated 600 liters (159 gal., 4 bbl) crude as it flowed down into the sea with an estimated 50 liters (13 gal.) making it to ocean waters.  The “carwash” scandal was initially suspected of playing a roll with union officials and industry analysts concerned given the scandal appeared to be diverting the company’s attention away from routine operations and maintenance.  But it quickly became clear thieves caused the spill as they attempted to steal oil.

As of 2016, the frequency of spills and ubiquity of petroleum contamination in both water and animal tissues are a source of increasing consternation for fisherfolk across Rio de Janeiro’s coast.  Ongoing investigations into multiple deaths and disappearances of fishermen since the 2000 Guanabara Bay spill appear related to their calls to change the business as usual culture pervading the region.  Investigations into that violence now appear to be at a stalemate.  Fisherman Lauro Coelho Jr. told NPR last June “the oil industry is involved in an environmental and economic conflict in which there is a clash between development and the environment.  And in the midst of this conflict, deaths occurred.”  Coelho went on to say he had no evidence directly linking the fishermen murders and threats to any specific polluter.  Petrobas has publicly stated their company is “unaware of these incidents and rejects any act of violence against the fishermen… All of our projects rigorously follow the various government environmental controls and are licensed.”

Degraded Ecosystem Function

The rapidly locally disappearing (and data deficient across its global range) Somalia fluviatilis.  Image: Fernando Trujillo.

There are a variety of metrics showing reduced ecological structure and function across Rio’s coastal zone over the past several decades.  But perhaps the clearest comes from the trajectory of the freshwater dolphin the tucuxi (Sotalia fluviatilis).  Sergio Ricardo, director of the Bahia Viva NGO told Vice Sports a few months back:

“The great environmental indicator of the level of pollution in the bay is the tucuxi.  In 1995 Rio de Janeiro State University identified 800 [tucuxi] in the bay, ten years later there were 400, and now there are just 35,” said Ricardo. “They’ve been described as the most contaminated mammals in the world.”

The fate of the tucuxi, a freshwater dolphin found in Brazil, also highlights the failure of the Rio state government’s Guanabara Bay Depollution Program, which began in 1995, has been extended several times, and has failed to produce significant improvements in the condition of the water.

According to Ricardo, Rio’s historic inability to clean up the bay meant the city’s pre-Olympic promises rang hollow. “We knew that the pledge to clean 80% of the waters of the bay wouldn’t work,” he said angrily. “The International Olympic Committee was highly irresponsible.  If the depollution programs hadn’t worked in 20 years, how could they accept this target, which was obviously based on false promises?”

Dead fish float on the edge of Guanabara Bay in 2015, a part of which is the Rio 2016 Olympic Games sailing venue.  The polluted bay receives a majority of the city’s raw sewage and officials have recently admitted their cleanup goals won’t be met in time for the Olympics.  Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images.

51-year-old fisherman Robson Salgado de Oliveira told the same reporter:

“There was shrimp in the bay up until two or three years ago.  And anchovies and hake, but now they’re basically extinct.  I have to travel further and further away every day to get a decent haul. I work two shifts per day, starting at 3 a.m., and make around the minimum salary.”

An Opportunity Lost

Axel Grael, vice mayor of nearby Niterói and co-founder of an NGO promoting both sailing and environmentalism told the The Washington Post last year, “In the Glória Marina, the conditions are terrible… We had enough time…to make a leap in the environmental quality of the bay.  There was a lack of political will and management initiative.”

Brazilian Olympic sailor Isabel Swan who won Bronze in 2012 defeatedly noted last year that she “always believed in the project Rio 2016 as something good for Rio.  But the way things happen, the delay in things, the bureaucracy, these things mean that Brazil does not go forward.  This is my sadness.”

And just in case you think all this attention will amount to continued global pressure or assistance from abroad post Opening Ceremony, you have to only go so far as to ask some of the athletes what they think.  In an essay for The Guardian, U.S. Olympic rower Megan Kalmoe infamously addressed the polluted water concerns head on last week.  She used not so subtle language and left no doubt that she was done with any discussion of environmental quality:

I have worked for 10 years to get to this point and will continue to work as hard as I can over the next few weeks to make the most of this very special and unique opportunity.

But all you want to do is talk about sh*t in the water.

My request to everyone who is fixated on sh*t in the water: stop.  Stop trying to ruin the Olympics for us.

I can’t be sure when the first headlines about the water quality in Rio appeared and the conversation really started.  But ever since then, it seems like it’s all people want to talk about.  And I can’t really understand why.  At this point, it is known that there are issues with the water quality.  It is known that athletes are going to be at risk for illness.  It is known that we are going to have to be smart, hygienic and take precautions.  Great.  Let’s move on.

What purpose does it serve to dwell on this?  What benefit can we possibly gain from drilling athletes on their position on the water quality in Rio?  None…

I will row through sh*t for you, America.

And I will do it gladly, and proudly, because rowing on this team in Rio is not something I’m afraid of, or going to complain about.  I will do it, and I will defend fiercely the dignity of the people who are doing their best to make everyone happy while we are all guests in their beautiful country.  I will do it, and I will try to discourage you from taking away even the tiniest bit of magic or excitement from a single one of my teammates who have earned this trip with their blood and sweat, and all of whom deserve to have a really positive experience in Rio.

So there you have it.  It is apparently time to get on with the games.  Because clearly, folks competing against one another is the only thing we should worry about these days.  Somehow I think the NCAA and NFL would strongly agree with that sentiment.

That and getting your Hepatitis A booster.

And maybe an antibiotic or two.

Let the games begin!

Image: Tomo News US

Gabriel Anderson, 13, photographs a section of the oil spill in Ventura. He was with his father, Sean Anderson, a professor at Cal State Channel Islands, who was collecting samples to test for toxicity. Image: Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times.

Yet another start of the summer and yet another pipeline break on the south coast.

A Year of Spilling Dangerously

Our oil infrastructure here in coastal southern California has certainly had a pretty horrid year.  We started with last year’s mid-May Refugio Oil Spill.  The largest oil spill in Santa Barbara County since the infamous 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill just kept on giving and giving in the form of sporadic tar balling of beaches across 170 km of coast into late June of 2015.  As a consequence, my students, colleagues, and I spent the late spring and early summer of 2015 tracking tarring impacts across more than 50 of our southland beaches.

Just when we felt we had wrapped up our initial characterization of Refugio impacts, we were thrust into the Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Field Blowout.  That four month-long fiasco in Porter Ranch totally eradicated more than a year’s worth of very hard-won, state-wide carbon emission reductions as we vented more than 97,100 metric tons of methane and 7,300 metric tons of ethane into our atmosphere.  That day in, day out natural gas blowout à la the Deepwater Horizon was caused by infrastructure that predated our energy crises of the 1970s.  That venting and the ensuing management crisis hobbled our nation’s fifth largest natural gas storage facility as it burped out a carbon footprint larger than the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010.  Both a healthy dose of prudence and a spate of legislative constraints placed on the storage facility’s owners (Southern California Gas), have kept this key piece of our energy infrastructure hobbled and offline as we enter the time of the year when we most need a nimble and quickly-responsive electrical grid (did I mention we have been seeing triple digit temperatures of late).  So I hope you can forgive me for thinking we were justified in expecting something of a reprieve of energy infrastructure crises as we rolled into the 4^th of July holiday.

Unfortunately, we picked the wrong week to catch up on our sleep.

Hall Canyon Pipeline Spill

First map identifying spill site. Image: VCFD via @avmartinez

Kirk and Kelly Atwater and some of their neighbors woke to what they later recognized was likely a pressure release valve screaming an unusual whine around 4:30 am on Thursday, June 23, 2016.  The Atwaters fell back to sleep, but were soon re-awoken by the pungent smell of oil wafting into their home.  The increasingly strong smell eventually prodded them to walk out of their Ventura Hills home and search for the culprit.  Kirk disappointedly found fresh crude flowing though a narrow creek that bisects his property above Ventura High School around 5:00 am.  He hopped onto his Vespa and motored up to the oil pipeline a few hundred meters up the canyon from his home.  Sure enough, the crude was pouring out of a junction box and flowing into the head of the Prince Barranca within Hall Canyon.  Kirk first called 911 to alert the authorities and then called the “in case of emergency” 1-800 number affixed to the pipeline itself, reaching the pipeline’s operation control center in Long Beach, California.  It was 5:30 am.

Rapid Response

The rest of us woke to news reports of a potentially very large pipeline break just east of the City of Ventura.  Those first few dribbles of news suggested that as much as 200,000 barrels of oil might have been released into a creek and were apparently headed to the Ocean with a possible entry point near San Jon Road on San Buenaventura State Beach, one of our long-term sandy beach monitoring sites.  It goes without saying that oil spills rarely fall on convenient days or happen at civilized times.

The previous evening saw our Sandy Beach Field Crew present the interim results of our 2016 Sandy Beach Rapid Assessment Synoptic Surveys of beach health and our assessments of Refugio Oil Spill impacts as of one year post-spill.  We had just sent everyone off for some well-deserved vacation time when BANG!  New Spill.  Fearing several of our monitoring sites were about to (again) be hit by oil, I began reaching out to our just-deactivated field team.  Several folks reported they could help, but would need a few hours to get back to town/finish-up long-postponed activities planned for that June 23^rd morning.  Not wanting to wait, I grabbed my son (a seasoned beach monitor, excellent parasite dissector, etc.) and we bee-lined to the City of Ventura.  On our drive into Ventura, reports started trickling in that the oil appeared contained to the hillside region of Ventura near Grove Street and Grove Lane.  We therefore elected to first check the origin site to confirm that oil was indeed contained near the release site.

We began by conducting a few driving transects from the 101 Freeway (near the beach) inland towards the hills on South Seaward Avenue and associated streets.  Driving slowly with our windows down (and with frequent roadside pit stops), we could detect no petroleum odor as had been rumored to proximate to South Seaward Avenue.  To be sure this was a qualitative assessment.  But as we have seen in the past, were oil to get into storm drains or urban creeks you can rapidly see a progression of both petroleum and smells across the urban/coastal plain as those hydrocarbons migrate seaward through the urban matrix.

Following that brief odor inspection, we headed up into the hills above Ventura High School to get a firsthand read on the spill and figure out if we indeed needed to prioritize additional pre-oiling beach surveys.

A Fouled Barranca

Sean sampling the crude flow in Prince Barranca. June 23, 2016.

As we approached the Grove Lane area of the Ventura Hills, we quickly honed in on the cluster of fire, hazmat, and police just off Poli Street.  As our goal was to not get in the way of any first responders, we went a bit farther up the hill from the primary aggregation to see if we might be able to get a sense of the magnitude of the release in this residential neighborhood.  Within a minute or so we came upon a cluster of media disembarking from their TV vans, etc. along with a scattering of County Fire in the side yard of the Kelly and Kirk Atwater.  We introduced ourselves and the Atwaters kindly invited us to come on in and take a look at the spill running through the steep ravine that bisects their property.  After several minutes of answering the Atwaters’ questions, we headed down for an initial inspection.

With a friendly “be careful of the poison oak, its really thick down there,” we shimmied down the ivy-covered bank to where a few intrepid news photographers and videographers were collecting images of flowing oil in the small channel for their upcoming stories.

The pipeline release point was perhaps 500 m upstream from our inspection site on the Atwater Property.  The Prince Barranca lies within the greater Hall Canyon and is a key tributary for local surface water migrating from the upper reaches of this section of the Ventura Hills down to the flatlands of the core of the City of Ventura and eventually into the arroyo that discharges into the ocean at San Buenaventura State Beach (one of our beach health monitoring sites) at San Jon Road.  At the Atwater’s home, the rim of the gorge is spanned by a city water main essentially running straight across the perhaps 200 m span of the top of the channel, suspended perhaps 50 m above the floor of the barranca.  The barranca’s sides run downward at slopes of 20 to 40° which made access a challenge for clean-up crews (later in the day they would cut steps into the slope’s face to make it easier to ascend and descend with equipment).  Oil was flowing in the primary channel such that at peak the torrent averaged about 30 cm in depth (excluding pools) and one to two meters in width.

From afar I initially mistook this flow to be oil being discharged into a low flow channel capturing surface runoff.  As I got closer it became clear that there was no water in this channel and I was seeing pure crude running through an otherwise dry channel.

About 400 m down stream from our inspection point, hazmat teams managed to bolster the berm surrounding a pre-existing debris basin at the end of the daylit segment of this channel before it runs under the core of city streets.  Hazmat pumps and tankers were joined by at least two 3,000 gallon tanker trucks from the clean-up contractors by about 9:30 am.  Major oil flows in the channel had effectively ceased sometime before 9:15 am.

Pumping oil from catchment below Atwater property ~9:00 am.  Image: @VCFD_PIO

By 10:00 am the oil level in the barranca at the Atwater property had dropped perhaps 10 cm (4 inches) and perhaps 20 cm (8 inches) by 10:30 am from the maximum oil level.  From my quick inspection there seemed to be comparatively little soil penetration given the density of both river stone and the thick natural cementing of the sediments in the thalweg.  The pumping out of oil from that debris basin seemed to be the primary driver of the quick draw down of the oil level.

Crew members work to keep crude oil from flowing into the ocean after a spill in Ventura, CA. Thursday, June 23, 2016. Image: Rob Varela / The Ventura County Star.

Spilled Crude

This oil was a light crude that exhibited surprisingly little volatilization.  The heavy marine layer/June gloom clearly helped with that, but the lack of strong odors (confirmed by VOC sniffers in use by the firefighters distributed across the neighborhood) was still something of a mystery.  We collected a few samples of the clean crude for subsequent toxicity experiments and (if needed) fingerprinting.  This crude was extracted from backcountry wells elsewhere in Ventura County by Aera Energy.

Our most recent estimate of total oil released has not been updated since early afternoon on June 23.  We know these numbers are often subject to revision (usually quietly, with little public attention), but for now our official estimate is pegged at 700 bbl (29,400 gal, 111,290 l).  While this was an “up to 700 barrels” number in the words of the official press release from unified command, that seems within the ballpark of what I was seeing in the channel and debris basin.  Look for a revised number when the clean-up crews wrap their operations.

Wildlife Impacts

Residents reported that this barranca is dry save for in the immediate wake of our very infrequent heavy rainfall.  They couldn’t recall the last time the channel harbored significant flow, but it has clearly been at least several years.  Desiccated and decayed algal thalli (presumably Cladophra spp.) in the channel substrate suggest that even the routine bankside irrigation by residents wasn’t enough to support significant algal or invertebrate communities.  While I expect these organisms were more abundant in the deeper pools, those were totally obliterated by the crude oil and not assessable during my brief, post-oiling assessment.

A pair of Cooper’s Hawks (Accipiter cooperii) had recently taken up residence adjacent to this stream, hitting the local Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura) populations hard.  Other birds that were common include the usual suspects osuch as Buteo hawks and corvids.  I saw no evidence of vertebrates coming into contact with the oil as of mid morning.

Archiving field samples in our lab. This crude was collected flowing in Prince Barranca. June 23, 2016.

The likeliest longer term impact of this spill will be to vertebrate movement.  This barranca is clearly a wildlife corridor facilitating movement of small to medium terrestrial vertebrates (e.g. skunks, bobcats, coyotes) through this neighborhood.  Oil and a lack of soft sediments made detecting any tracks or sign difficult, but the landscape strongly suggests such use (an observation later confirmed by local residents).  It would be great to set-up a few camera traps in the ensuing weeks post clean-up to confirm such wildlife use as our lab has done elsewhere in the county.

Crimson Pipeline

Initial reports have now confirmed that a pipeline junction experienced some type of catastrophic failure rather than a corrosion-driven failure of the pipe walls per se as we saw with Plains All American’s Line 901 segment in Santa Barbara County that birthed the Refugio Spill in May of 2015.  Oil was flowing from the 25 cm (10”) diameter V-10 pipeline that carries crude from inland production fields in Ventura County to Los Angeles refineries.  V-10 is owned and operated by Colorado-based Crimson Pipeline LLC.  As with so much of our oil and gas infrastructure, this pipeline is old.  Company spokeswoman Kendall Klinger reported that while V-10 was built in 1941, it was well maintained, current with all relevant safety inspections, and has been actively maintained.  Indeed, residents in the Hall Canyon area noted that workers we conducting repairs late into the night (to at least 10:30 pm, using high-output lighting arrays to illuminate their worksite) the evening before the spill.  They were apparently working on that exact segment of pipe that failed and began disgorging oil hours later and subsequently referenced by Ms. Klinger.

Paralleling the Refugio catastrophe, suboptimal detection systems may have been a key point of failure.  Pipeline spokeswoman Kendall Klingler subsequently reported V-10 had been emptied of oil earlier in the week for maintenance work, then subsequently re-charged with oil post-servicing (apparently the previous night).  She suggested that the system was not fully pressurized at the time of the spill and that this lower than normal operating pressure of the line prevented the usual spill detection systems from working.

In the wake of this spill, several news outlets have noted that Crimson has a history of petroleum releases in recent years.

Crimson Pipeline Previous Spill History

This summary is modified from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s pipeline spill database. Data reflects the most recent update (May 1, 2016), I accessed the database on June 23, 2016.

Contractors working the scene and removing surface crude midmorning on June 23, 2016.

The federal Department of Transportation’s Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s pipeline incident database shows Crimson’s California pipelines were responsible for 10 other spills (as of May 1, 2016) caused by corrosion, equipment failure, and other actors damaging their pipes since 2006.  Half of these happened in Ventura County.  The estimated 1,185,000 l (7,453 bbls, 313,000 gal) of petroleum released caused at least $5.8 million in property damage.  It should be noted that nearly all the oil released from these spills was recovered during remediation efforts, that the median oil released per spill was 2,385 l with a mean release of 118,493 l per spill, and apparently one-third of these spills were caused by outside parties’ actions (when other entities were conducted excavation operations nearby a given oil pipeline segment, etc.).  Lastly, it is important to keep in mind that the requirements for reporting any such spills have been tightened up in recent years and now include reporting what had historically been considered a negligible (non-reportable amounts) release.

Crews will need several more days of clean-up to harvest the last of the contaminated soils and associated materials.  Restoration will, of course, be a longer-term game.

Helping the Public Understand

Here are a few of the stories that featured our lab or used our lab on background in the wake of this spill:

Area Expert Speaks on Spill: Ventura County Star

Response to Incident: Ventura County Star

Ventura Spill Controlled: Ventura County Star

Spill Misses Ocean: Los Angeles Times

The Latest Spill Updates: ABC News

California Oil Spilled Near Pipeline: AP Wire Service

The one-year anniversary of the Refugio Oil Spill has brought with it a raft of renewed interest in this oil spill and the consequences as we now see them.  We’ve done a good deal of media over the last couple of weeks.  Add to that plenty of breaking stories from all quarters (often speaking to pending or future litigation) and the public now has a much better sense of what actually happened in the lead-up to the spill as well as the still-growing legacy of this injury.

What follows is my take on what we know as of May 19, 2016, 365 days post release of oil.  This is the first in a series of posts about what happened and what we know of the impacts from the largest oil spill on this stretch of our California coast since the infamous 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill.

Factoids:

• An estimated 148,000 gallons of oil released, with at least 60,000 gallons accumulating on the beach/nearshore ocean at Refugio State Beach.
• Pipeline operators were unaware oil was spilling from their rupture pipeline.  Failing to detect the leak, the controller even restarted the line after the spill occurred.
• Actual response/clean-up did not begin until Day 2.

Timeline:

Relevant Pre-Spill History

note: This is a very short list, but it represents what I have found to be often under-appreciated facts, essentially to understand the Refugio Spill.

Summerland oil piers near Santa Barbara, circa 1901-1903. Image: Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.

• 1890’s: oil discovered in Summerland California and western Ventura County.
• 1896: Summerland’s offshore oil field becomes the first marine petroleum deposit to ever be drilled. Extractors use terrestrial drilling technology operated from extensive piers projecting out into the sea.
• 1969: January 28, Union Oil Platform Alpha off of Summerland, CA suffers a blowout beginning the Santa Barbara Oil Spill. At the time it is the largest marine oil spill in U.S. History.  The spill is mythic and became a central part of the origin story of the modern environmental movement.  To say the the ramifications from this event were huge is an understatement.  This spill helps usher in the modern era (the so-called “Golden Age”) of Environmental Legislation, helping build tremendous support for new state and federal laws such as the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, California Environmental Quality Act, and California Coastal Act.
• 1989: Exxon Valdez Spill covers Prince William Sound with north slope Alaskan crude after the drunken captain leaves navigation to a junior officer as he sits in his cabin below decks.  This spill motivated the phase out of single hulled oil tankers, fostered the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, and spurred the best suite of oil spill impact studies to date.  This also leads to the creation of our current suite of Natural Resources Damage Assessment protocols, activated post spill to documenting spill impacts.
• 1991: Responding to environmentalist and popular pressure, the Plains All American Pipeline is constructed, reducing the need for moving oil via tanker in the Santa Barbara Channel.
• 2004: Responding to post 9/11 fears of eminent terrorist threat, the newly created Department of Homeland Security massively overhauls the National Incident Command System, creating the framework with which we now respond to oil spills.
• 2010: Deepwater Horizon’s failed cementing of an exploratory wellhead into the Macondo lease off the Louisiana coast leads to 87 days of continuous oil flowing into the northern Gulf of Mexico and creating the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history and the deepest such blowout ever.  Most of this impact was at the bottom of the ocean and the midwater region of the water column, although significant surface and littoral oiling occurs.  While a temporary deepwater drilling moratorium was enacted, it was soon repealed under political pressure from the oil and gas industry.  No significant legislation nor any substantial policy resulted (save for breaking up of the Minerals Management Service into daughter agencies) from this unprecedented spill, the first time a spill of such magnitude lead to effectively no change in oil spill response.
• 2012: Plains All American detects significant corrosion issues with Line 901.

Refugio Spill Day 1: May 19, 2015

note: My own recollections and notes are augmented below by testimony by Plains All American Pipeline, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, Santa Barbara County Fire Department, Coast Guard, and the U.S. and California EPAs.

The oil pipeline rupture at Refugio State Beach may have spilled as much as 105,000 gallons of crude, authorities said. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

• prior 10:45: Plains All American pipeline segment 901 ruptures due to extensive external corrosion of the metal pipe and begins leaking oil for some unknown period of time through paper-thin pipe walls.  The rupture happens landward of the 101 Freeway, just inland from Refugio State Beach about 32 km (20 mi) west of downtown Santa Barbara.
• 10:45: The 61 cm (24”) pipeline segment 901 that transports crude oil roughly 18 km (11 mi) between Las Flores Canyon and Gaviota has ruptured. Plains All American’s Midland, TX pipeline command center shuts down oil flow in the pipeline by depowering pumps at the their inland Sisquoc Station for inspection and maintenance.  The company is oblivious to any oil spillage and does not realize oil is flowing unchecked into the environment at this point.
• 10:55: Pipeline pumps are restarted, pouring pressurized oil out of the pipeline fracture.  Pumps are shut down again approximately 20 minutes later.  Within three minutes of restarting, pressure plunged to 199 psi, triggering a low-pressure alarm that quickly resets when pressure climbed just above 200 psi.  The alarm was set to be tripped at such a low pressure that it never sounded again as oil flowed out the pipe at just above 200 psi trigger level.  An additional leak detection system that also would have sounded alarms had been disabled by an operator who was dealing with another problem/maintenance.
• 11:15: Pipeline pumps are turned off again, still with no realization by operators any oil has spilled.
• 11:30: A Plains operator remotely shuts down the entire pipeline because of pressure anomalies causing concern in the pipeline command center in Midland, TX.
• 11:42: An unidentified member of the public at Refugio State Beach calls 911 reporting a pungent smell.  Santa Barbara County Fire Department and California State Parks respond to the 911 call as (crazy as it may sound) a preparedness drill with emergency workers and Plains employees is about to start.  These first responders (not the company) reach out to the National Spill Response Center (an informational clearinghouse for releases of hazardous substances) to report a potential oil spill based on the heavy crude oil smell in the air.
• 12:20: Firefighters finally discover oil flowing across the beach and into the ocean.
  

  This classic image of Derek Fisher holding onto the shirt of Steven Botello on May 19, 2015 as he reaches out to an oil soaked bird on Refugio State Beach.  Image: Lara Cooper/Noozhawk.

• 12:30 Plains dispatch in Midland, TX dispatches a worker to do a visual inspection of the pipeline, still unaware an oil spill is in progress.
• 12:39 The Coast Guard is notified.
• 12:47 The Coast Guard calls the National Spill Response Center to confirm and oil spill has happened.
• 13:30: A Plains All American employee finally confirms an oil spill has happened.  About the same time, Santa Barbara firefighters manage to partially staunch the flow of oil onto the beach by damming a storm drain with dirt and rocks.
• 13:56: The National Spill Response Center notifies the Federal Environmental Protection Agency a spill has occurred.
• 14:56: Plains All American notifies National Spill Response Center a spill has occurred, estimating at least 21,000 gallons has leaked (current estimates put the volume about seven times this amount).
• 15:00: California State University Channel Islands is notified of an oil spill.  Our ESRM Program immediately begins mobilizing field crews to sample sandy beaches, an annual task routinely scheduled to begin June 1 of each year.  This was no small feat as the semester had concluded the week before.
  

  Kelsey Gerckens of KEYT3 News interviewing Dr. Anderson on May 19, 2015.

• 16:00: Refugio State Beach is closed.  It will remain closed until July 17.
• sometime before sunset: Clean Seas oil spill response vessel arrives on scene, but determines it can do little before sunset and will not be able to mobilize its required fleet of voluntary fishing vessels to help with surface booming to contain floating oil until the morning.
• 16:30: traffic slowdowns have become extensive along the 101 Freeway adjacent to Refugio Beach as onlookers attempt to view what is happening and California Highway Patrol attempts to block drivers from pulling over along the roadside for better looks.  At least two private citizens operate drones near the site (an action still totally legal and permitted at this point).  My neighbors who happened to be driving by Refugio at the time and were unaware of the spill reported a very pungent smell that was not alleviated with closed windows nor recirculated air.  They also reported headaches.
• evening of May 19: media reports a spill has happened and that Refugio State Beach is closed, but with almost no facts they report mostly speculation and eyewitness accounts from beachgoers.

Refugio Spill Day 2: May 20, 2015

ESRM Sandy Beach Team members Chase Tillman and Paul Spaur exchange observations with a bird monitor at El Capitan State Beach on the morning of May 20, 2015.

• 5:00: the Incident Command formally activates, airspace over the spill is closed, ocean vessel traffic is restricted
• 6:30: CSUCI’s ESRM Rapid Beach Assessment Team is onsite at El Capitan State Beach, conducting rapid beach health assessments.  No oil has yet arrived to El Capitan sands, Clean Seas in booming the ocean surface just offshore of El Capitan Beach.
• 9:30: State Park Lifeguards begin asking campers at El Capitan to voluntarily remain on the bluffs and not come down to beach.
• 11:00: State Park Lifeguards begin to close El Capitan State Beach, informing campers that they must evacuate state property immediately.  We conclude our sampling of El Capitan State Beach just as Lifeguards formally close the beach to public access.
• 12:00: Our ESRM team is refused access to Refugio State Beach and out petition to map spill extent with our drones go unanswered, even after being asked to help map the site by one federal agency (but that is a story for another time).
• 13:00: ESRM samples Gaviota State Beach.  We begin to be inundated with media requests for reports of impacts and first hand observer accounts of the spill.
• prior to 17:00: the first oil begins arriving on El Capitan State Beach.

NBC4’s Gordon Tokumatsu interviewing Dr. Sean Anderson at El Capitan State Beach on May 20, 2015.

Stay tuned for the next post with the continuation of the Refugio Timeline…

After many hours, I have finally completed my Paper.