John & Anne Wiley

The May 19, 2015 oil spill by Plains All American Pipeline near the Refugio Beach park is said to have spread more than a hundred miles along our beaches. The most obvious signs of it still visible from the air now are on beach rocks between Refugio and El Capitan.

4098 Rock Party

Rock cleaning parties like this are scattered along many beaches, as crews of white suited workers sprawl  chatting as they scrub tar off and bag it for disposal.

4072 Slow & Steady

Where there had been many boulders wearing dalmatian decorations of tar, now most have been cleaned nearly back to their pre-spill appearance. Thousands of bags filled with tar from boulders, beaches, and boats collecting it off the water are being trucked away.

4052 Bag Brigade

Even after all this work by hundreds of people, there’s still far more oil and tar on our local waters than we’ve seen before. Some or all of it may be due to increased natural seepage due to pressure buildup deep beneath the sea floor when oil production was shut down.

3920 6/15/2015 Tar Globs

A comment on yesterday’s Edhat post of my pix showing the aftermath of the May 19, 2015 Refugio oil spill got me thinking. I’d been looking for aerials from about the same angle and time of day taken before the spill, to compare with the black water color I’m seeing now. The commenter suggested comparing Google maps satellite views, but it can be difficult to determine the date those were taken and of course the angle is always pretty much straight down (from space). So I looked at it with Google Earth which tells you the image date and allows for adjusting the point of view to replicate what my aerials show. To some extent at least, because the 3D effect in gEarth is a rather pale comparison to reality. Anyway, here’s what I came up with showing my aerial on top and gEarth below it.

2797 Ellwood Oil

The oil in the water is quite obvious to me, compared with the sandy water below that has a bit of pulverized kelp and probably some natural seep oil mixed in. The color difference in the deeper water is because my camera actually was at the angle shown and thus reflecting some sunlight from the surface and the water column (the satellite is looking pretty much straight down). Here’s the same sort of thing, looking at the western beach along El Capitan.

2835 El Capitan Oil

Because there’s less reflection from the surface, the oil there shows up much more clearly in my aerial pic. Of course the vegetation in these pix differs considerably from what it was in the January sat views, but I’ve tried to approximate the water colors. It will be interesting to see how the spill evolves over time, but hopefully we’ll see the oil gradually dissipate and marine life return to normal.

I took another look at pix of the oil spill from Wednesday 5/20 and Thursday 5/21, and wished they were comparable. For instance, take this pic from the 20th of the beach in front of Las Flores Refinery. The entrance to the refinery is in the brown center of the lower horizontal green band.

1341 Las Flores Beach

You can pretty easily make out the streaks of oil sheen and some of the thicker goo that was blowing there (and beyond to El Capitan). I also got this zoom shot as we flew past. If you follow the freeway from the top in the above pic, this next one shows the beach across from where the thin green center divider gives way to brown. The path from the road up toward the water at the left of this pic corresponds to the bend in the small leftmost road where it disappears into the trees across from the upper horizontal green band in the top pic.

1354 Goo Streak

The streak of thicker goo at the top-right is easy to spot, and you can see a black line where the water meets the beach. Just about 28 hours later it looks much the same, yet quite different in this similar pic.

1551 Day’s Difference

The thick goo’s gone, as it was in many places we’d seen it the day before. Whether old seaweed or oil, the dark spots on the beach have been cleaned up. The black water line is completely gone. But the brownish-gray area along the shallow water seems wider and darker. I guess that’s oil somehow mixed with the water, but maybe someone taking water samples will publish data on that. So far I’ve not seen any such reports, but I’ve heard from someone in a group of scientists studying all aspects of the spill so maybe one of them will publish something. We’d like to go again, and this time maybe I’ll get more similar views for comparison in case someone else expresses interest while gathering information for analysis.

Cleanup is in process on the Refugio Oil Spill by Plains All American Pipeline near the Refugio Beach park. We flew the coast from El Capitan out to Jalama past the second rail bridge looking at the coast on Thursday. Much of the oil has dispersed out into the Channel and along the beaches, or been picked up by the many people and boats working on it. But late in the afternoon this view from Refugio shows a large slick moving East toward El Capitan at the top.

1845 Thursday Oil Slick

Below the point at El Capitan the next point is Las Flores where the hillside refinery the oil came from is coating their beach. In the other direction all the way to Jalama we saw areas of dark surf like this, mostly on East facing beaches like this one just West of the pier at Gaviota Beach.

1639 West Gaviota Beach

Here’s another view, from the North showing the dark surf at the main park and camping area.

1575 Gaviota Beach Park

I see an RV and a few vehicles there, but thought it would be packed for the holiday so maybe it’s been closed along with Refugio and El Capitan. People are being kept well away from the beaches and cleanup areas along the coast, including national and international reporters.

Here are some aerial pix of the oil spill by Plains All American Pipeline near the Refugio Beach park and campground in Santa Barbara County, CA. The spill began sometime around noon on May 19, 2015 and we flew over the region about 3pm the next afternoon. This is where the oil reached the ocean, a little West of Refugio Beach.

1514 Oil Meets Water

At the top you can see a few of the many workers and volunteers along with all sorts of equipment cleaning up this mess. Just across the railroad tracks and 101 freeway from this spot is where the 24″ pipeline burst.

1505 Pipeline Burst (click to enlarge)

The crude oil came to the surface from the buried pipe just above the two black boxes at left, and filled the shallow ditch. After the pipe was shut off and the culvert running to the beach at right was plugged, trucks were brought in to empty the ditch. Offshore the Ocean Sentinel sweeper boat joined other boats deploying oil containment booms, and began collecting oil off the water.

1482 Ocean Sentinel

When I snapped this it didn’t seem to be catching much oil, but maybe it was heading toward the many other large oil and tar patches we saw. This smaller boat was working on some small patches.

1374 Boat Sweeping Oil Spill Off Refugio

I’ve put many more and larger pix from this flight on my Photo Page (right column of this page).  Some different smaller versions are in John on Edhat (also at right column of this page).