Santa Barbara County Needs to Verify for Oil Safety

TRUST BUT VERIFY:  There’s no use in crying over spilled milk. Or so they say.

Oil, however, is another matter.

To date, Santa Barbara has never had a catastrophic milk spill. But when it comes to oil spills, we’ve had a few.

The most important is the one that hasn’t happened yet.

This brings me to a longtime former part-time Santa Barbara resident, Ronald Reagan, famous for his memorable line “Trust but verify.”

It turns out that this is a translation of a Russian proverb that Reagan — then President of the United States — used repeatedly when negotiating nuclear missile treaties with leaders of what was then still the Soviet Union.

It worked. 

If it was good enough for negotiating a nuclear missile pact, I’d suggest it’s good enough for Sable Oil, which is now racing pell-mell to restart the single biggest oil processing operation off the county’s coast.

This operation — known colloquially until recently as ExxonMobil’s Santa Ynez Unit — was effectively shut down on May 19, 2015, when the Plains All American pipeline sprung its now-infamous Refugio leak. The pipeline, running along the mountain side of the freeway, was carrying crude oil pumped from Exxon’s three offshore platforms to refineries in Kern County. 

In 35 minutes, about 142,000 gallons of crude burst out of a corroded section of the pipe. Before anyone knew what happened, thousands of gallons of oil oozed its way back into the ocean. 

Hundreds of animals living in and out of the water were covered in oil and died. A Santa Barbara jury would find the pipeline company guilty of nine criminal charges — one felony and eight misdemeanors — for violating basic safety practices that operators knew or should have known would lead to this catastrophe. A 10-mile stretch of the pipeline located along our county’s coast was badly corroded, some spots by as much as 85 percent. 

Back then, no one verified. Today, we are being asked to blindly trust Sable Oil and the state government agencies calling the shots that the pipeline can safely be restarted. In fact, it’s worse than that. Instead, we are being told to trust. And blindly.

As part of the deal, Sable Offshore — a brand-new company created withmoney borrowed from ExxonMobil — bought the pipeline itself, which Exxon had previously bought from Plains All American. It is now seeking permits from the California Fire Marshal to reactivate the pipeline. It is not proposing to replace the existing pipeline, but instead to repair the old pipeline, which is reportedly corroded and badly pitted in at least 80 spots. 

In addition, Sable is also seeking a special waiver to not include a protection system that is a basic safety feature used on pretty much all underground oil and gas pipelines. It prevents pipeline corrosion.

What do any of us, including the County of Santa Barbara, know about this proposal? Pretty much nothing. 

Am I exaggerating for effect? I wish I were. 

And, because of ongoing litigation with Sable and fear of being taken to the cleaners, no one in county government — its regulators, planners, elected officials, and their attorneys — can talk. 

No one knows on what basis Sable is seeking these waivers. We don’t know what Sable’s Plan B is. All we hear are vague allusions to a protective pipeline liner, something akin to an internal pipeline condom. The state Fire Marshal and Sable have declined to share this information with county officials. It’s proprietary information, they insist. 

In this regard, the Fire Marshal’s posture is unique. Detailed information about every other pipeline operating in Santa Barbara County is currently shared with county safety officials. 

After the 2015 disaster, federal pipeline safety officials identified 80 “anomalies” on the pipeline that were so corroded they demanded repair. Repair work on those anomalies is said to be ongoing as we speak. Will local officials be allowed to inspect these repairs just to make sure? No. 

The state Fire Marshal is said to be competent, diligent, and conscientious. But if we are not given access to the information necessary for verification, it’s hard to have trust. 

Our historical experience bears this out. Santa Barbara’s first cataclysmic offshore oil spill in 1969 was caused because the federal agency, then responsible for ensuring our safety, granted the oil company, Unocal, a waiver to not install an essential safety device — a simple drilling casing — designed to prevent such blowouts.

Later, we discovered the federal agency charged with preventing the Refugio oil spill of 2015 was so notoriously understaffed that it was forced to rely on the regulated pipeline companies to self-report and self-enforce.

We all saw how that worked out.

To date, the county has been stiff-armed in its attempts to get information. It has been forced to file Public Records Act requests for relevant information from relevant state agencies responsible for the safe operations of this stretch of pipeline. 

To the extent these requests have yielded any documents, they were so heavily redacted as to be indecipherable.

Because the county is in the process of settling a genuinely hairy lawsuit filed by Sable, no county officials are willing to say anything other than that the county has no jurisdiction. Admittedly, I’m no lawyer, but I have my doubts that’s the case. 

But just acting like sitting ducks is not going to protect this county from a marine disaster that history has repeatedly proved is real. 

The Supervisors of the County of Santa Barbara must bang the table loudly for access to essential information detailing the risks and safeguards involved. If every other oil pipeline company in the county is providing this information, certainly Sable — and the state Fire Marshal — can too. 

Trust. But verify.

Hey, I didn’t say that. Ronald Reagan did.