{"id":1505,"date":"2015-07-11T14:23:50","date_gmt":"2015-07-11T21:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/?p=1505"},"modified":"2022-08-01T12:29:52","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T19:29:52","slug":"refugio-state-beach-set-to-reopen-two-months-after-oil-spill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/2015\/07\/11\/refugio-state-beach-set-to-reopen-two-months-after-oil-spill\/","title":{"rendered":"Refugio State Beach set to reopen, two months after oil spill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Officials toured the beach Thursday and cleared it to reopen\u00a0July 17<\/strong><\/p>\n

Source of this article: The Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2015<\/a><\/p>\n

Refugio\u00a0State Beach in Santa Barbara County will reopen to the public next week, two months after a pipeline ruptured and fouled the coast with\u00a0thousands of gallons of thick black crude.<\/p>\n

Response officials toured the beach Thursday and cleared it to reopen\u00a0July 17 at noon.<\/p>\n

“We have made great progress and we are stoked,” said Eric Hjelstrom, state parks superintendent for the Santa Barbara area. “It is really neat to\u00a0see light at the end of the tunnel.”<\/p>\n

The 10.6-mile-long pipeline runs parallel\u00a0to U.S. 101 and spilled about 101,000 gallons of crude when it broke on May 19. About 21,000 gallons flowed into a storm\u00a0culvert and into the Pacific Ocean, about a quarter mile from\u00a0the state beach.<\/p>\n

Oil heavily coated a stretch of the Gaviota coast\u00a0and forced\u00a0the closure of Refugio and El Capitan state beaches. El Capitan reopened last month.<\/p>\n

Small tarballs from the spill made their way as far south as Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

The cleanup effort at the beach is mostly complete, said Alexia Retallack, a spokeswoman for the Department of Fish and Wildlife.<\/p>\n

Workers still need to scrape and scrub\u00a0oil off individual cobble rocks and remove heavy cleanup equipment before the park reopens, she said.<\/p>\n

Other difficult-to-access pocket beaches near the spill site are still being cleaned and will remain\u00a0off limits. Workers are spraying stained rocks with super cooled\u00a0carbon dioxide and chipping off the frozen oil,\u00a0Hjelstrom said.<\/p>\n

Contaminated dirt where oil flowed out of the culvert and down a cliff into the ocean is still being dug out by a\u00a0“spider” excavator, which has articulating legs that can climb up the cliff, he said.<\/p>\n

Since May,\u00a0195 dead birds and 106 marine mammals have been collected in the spill area.<\/p>\n

The 10.6-mile pipeline owned by Texas company Plains All American Pipeline had \u201cextensive\u201d external corrosion<\/a>, and the thickness of the pipe’s wall where it broke had degraded to an estimated one-sixteenth of an inch, according\u00a0to federal regulators.<\/p>\n

Investigators found a 6-inch opening along the bottom of the pipe where it broke.<\/p>\n

The company has been criticized<\/a> by lawmakers for a slow response to the spill.<\/p>\n

Mark S. Ghilarducci, director of the\u00a0Governor\u2019s Office of Emergency Services, said at a state hearing that the company failed<\/a> to meet the state deadline to\u00a0report such a spill within 30 minutes.<\/p>\n

State Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris’ office is still conducting criminal and civil investigations into the spill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Officials toured the beach Thursday and cleared it to reopen\u00a0July 17 Source of this article: The Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2015 Refugio\u00a0State Beach in Santa Barbara County will reopen to the public next week, two months after a pipeline ruptured and fouled the coast with\u00a0thousands of gallons of thick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,54,7,25,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-california-state-parks","category-drilling-or-mining","category-environment","category-pollution","category-southern-california"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1505"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3528,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions\/3528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}