Eyewitness to Disaster

It wasn’t quite a stiff-arm, but it was close. And he wasn’t exactly a goon. More of a mook.

It was the first two hours of the Refugio Oil Spill on May 19, 2015, and information was still very sketchy. We were told it was a “small” leak, but we’d also heard that neighbors were fleeing their homes, the fumes were so bad. I wanted to see for myself.

The campground was already closed, so I parked on the bluffs above the beach and started to pick my way through the chaparral. Before I could get a view, I saw out of the corner of my eye a man wearing a white collared shirt and holding a walkie-talkie lumbering toward me. “Stop!” he yelled.

I froze, worried I’d stepped into some kind of restricted area. But I hadn’t noticed any caution tape, road barriers, or other signs of danger. Just some turkey vultures circling overhead. I could smell the oil. “You can’t be here,” he said. I looked down at the red-and-blue Plains All American Pipeline logo on his left breast. At the time, I’d never even heard of the company. 

I showed him my press pass and gave him my spiel — we were on public property, the public had a right to know what was happening, and so forth. I used the word “public” a lot. “I don’t care,” he said. “Leave or you’ll get arrested.” We went back and forth a few more times. He flushed and pulled off his sunglasses. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

We were standing in knee-high brush, and something poked my calf. As I stepped toward a clearer patch of ground, he rushed at me with his arm outstretched. I got a shove to the chest, and he received a few expletives.

Not wanting to get arrested (even though I still didn’t know what for), I turned around and left. 

I didn’t have any more physical run-ins with Plains employees after that, but their strict control — and authority — over access and information never waned. Even for people much more important than me.

A few days later, we heard a story from then–County Supervisor Janet Wolf. She’d wanted to visit the county’s emergency operations center at Refugio to get the latest on cleanup efforts and to offer her support. But she was stopped at the gate by a Plains employee demanding to know who she was and what she wanted.

Wolf, never a shrinking violet, made quick work of the guard and, once inside, didn’t hesitate to express her outrage, telling a Coast Guard commander it was “wholly inappropriate” that “our polluter” was telling her or anyone else that they couldn’t enter the building.

It soon became clear that Houston-based Plains not only had a seat at the table of federal, state, and local officials who made up the unified command response team — in many ways, they led it. “They’re very much involved in the decision-making, if not running the show,” State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson said at the time. Local input, she said, was virtually ignored.

In June, a month after the accident, crews were excavating a three-story section of bluff that had trapped around 80,000 gallons of the 140,000-gallon spill. When and how the remaining oil would leak into the ocean was a matter of speculation. “That’s one of the million-dollar questions,” an EPA manager told me.

I watched as dumpster after dumpster was filled with ink-black dirt and trucked a short distance away to a staging area. The soil was tested and classified by contamination level while a Chumash representative in a hazmat suit sifted batches for cultural items. Some of the soil was shipped off to be used in construction projects. The rest went to landfills.

“Crude is a soup of a lot of different chemicals,” the EPA manager explained. They’d already detected benzene, he said, a carcinogen often found in produced oil.

We later learned Plains had developed a plan to “target” specific reporters they deemed “neutral to positive” and invite them to private media briefings so they could “help tell the progress story.” I didn’t make the list.

This section on offshore oil development was first published in the Santa Barbara Independent in partnership with Bluedot Living.

See also:

Will Sable Oil Begin Drilling Offshore? Is It Safe?

Who Gets to Say What About Sable