Last year, on the first day of spring, an oil tanker truck crashed on Highway 166 east of Santa Maria, spilling 6,700 gallons of crude oil and fuel into the Cuyama River. The driver was speeding and is finally being prosecuted by the Santa Barbara County district attorney.
ExxonMobil recently revived plans to send 70 such trucks daily, on the 101, from its Gaviota facility to the Nipomo refinery. If that doesn’t work out, they will then send the trucks barreling down the 166 to their Kern County pipeline. Those 70 trucks would then return to pick up the next day’s load.
Will the county and the state sanction this major pollution process and oil spills waiting to happen? For 30 years, this oil was piped north in substandard and neglected pipelines until the Refugio Beach oil spill shut down the pipeline.
Do the citizens and environment of Santa Barbara County need to bear the pollution and accident risk of this oil trucking so ExxonMobil can avoid the consequences of the Refugio spill and make a short-term profit?
Please contact your county supervisor and state Assembly and Senate members, and tell them to stop this dangerous and climate-killing project!
Larry Bishop
Buellton
This article appears in Mar 25 – Apr 4, 2021.
I’m responding as an environmentalist, but also something of a realist. Petroleum will recede as a fuel source, but never entirely, even as we power more of our vehicles with electricity and hydrogen.
In the meantime, there are 3 ways to transport oil: tanker trucks (as Larry Bishop describes), tanker trains, and pipeline. Tanker trucks are the most risky, followed by tanker trains which do concentrate oil in fewer trips due to their large load capacity. Actually, the safest is pipeline, BUT with some important qualifications. The advantage of pipelines is that they can circumvent and be run distant from housing, roads, and rivers – mostly.
HOWEVER, and as Larry Bishop notes, substandard construction and lackadaisical check-ups can lead to leakage and large spills. Pipelines can be safe but only if they are built to metallurgical standards and are state and federally mandated for regular upkeep and monitored for stresses and developing fissures.