The anxiety that spread around the western end of Goleta in October wafted through as quickly as the rotten-egg odor causing it.
But what concerned Ellwood-area residents as much as the smell was the speed — or, rather, the sluggishness — of notifications about the cause: drilling at an agricultural well that had hit a pocket of hydrogen sulfide gas.
“There could have been serious health consequences from this,” resident Barbara Massey said at a Goleta City Council meeting last month. “It didn’t seem the various agencies were really concerned.”
A post-incident action report developed late last year by the county Office of Emergency Management and other local agencies acknowledged breakdowns in communication between them, as well as delays in notifying the public.
Starting early in the morning of Oct. 9, the county Fire Department began receiving calls for a rotten-egg smell — the characteristic odor of the heavy, very flammable and extremely toxic hydrogen sulfide gas that can form in wells and other places where organic matter breaks down in the absence of oxygen.
Many residents at the time wondered whether the cause was the nearby Ellwood Onshore Facility, operated by oil company Venoco Inc. at 7979 Hollister Ave.
An initial county press release named the EOF as a possible source, while Venoco representatives said at the time that it couldn’t have been, as the EOF was not processing anything.
The source of the odor was discovered the evening of Oct. 9: The well, being drilled by New Mexico-based Stewart Brothers Drilling Co., hit a pocket of H2S 3,250 feet underground.
The smell did not dissipate until early on Oct. 11, after the well was plugged.
Response to the incident included the county Fire Department, Office of Emergency Management, Venoco, the city of Goleta, the county Public Health Department and Environmental Health Services, and the county Air Pollution Control District.
At a Jan. 17 Goleta Council meeting, county emergency management director Robert Lewin called the after-action review a “lessons-learned document.”
The presence of only a rotten-egg odor makes pinpointing the source and threat level difficult, he told the Goleta City Council last month.
In a new protocol worked out for reporting H2S odors, agencies and the public are asked to report the smell to county dispatch, which should notify the agencies in return if the source can’t be discovered.
That didn’t happen in this case, Lewin said.
Agencies said improvements to public notification could include a more robust social media presence and better city alerts. Agencies are also looking to improve their own H2S monitoring systems.
Goleta officials said they were left out of the loop for much of the first day of the incident, and what really upset them during the ordeal was the fact Venoco didn’t report to Goleta that its EOF fence-line H2S monitors detected the gas.
The city contends that an agreement between the two parties mandates immediate notification when the oil company’s monitors go off for something. Venoco argued that because its own facilities did not cause the monitor to go off, it did not need to warn the city.
Goleta neighborhood services and public safety director Vyto Adomaitis told the council the two sides are examining the protocol.
Venoco’s detection of H2S did send an automatic email immediately to the Air Pollution Control District the morning of Oct. 9 but the APCD did not see it until that evening.
Further aggravating the situation, Adomaitis said, was the acknowledgement by the drilling operators that the drilling team’s own H2S monitors went off, and that they did not notify the APCD.
He said the county is now reviewing permit protocols and requirements for drillers, which are handled by Environmental Health Services, which did not attend the council’s meeting.
While the council members expressed their appreciation that the agencies who showed up made efforts to revamp their protocols and take the heat in public, Councilman Michael Bennett tore into EHS, calling their absence a “major disappointment.”
It’s well known, he said, that H2S shows up in local underground water supplies.
“This is not new news to the Environmental Health Department,” Bennett said. “And I find that most disturbing.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.