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Photographs of the extensively-corroded Plains All American Pipeline segment that ruptured and caused the Refugio oil spill were released by Santa Barbara County’s Planning and Development Department this week, showing the excavation and evaluation of the damaged section.
Federal, state and county agencies have been overseeing the investigation into the May 19 spill as well as the cleanup response efforts.
Federal regulators of the pipeline, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, has issued corrective orders making Plains shut down and purge its two Santa Barbara County pipelines and do evaluation before starting operations.
In the meantime, two oil and gas production companies that use the shut-down crude oil pipelines have stopped production from their offshore platforms and the third, ExxonMobil, has applied for an emergency permit to truck the crude oil while the pipes are down. On Tuesday, Santa Barbara County denied the request.
The photographs included with this story were taken by Bruce Reitherman, on-site environmental coordinator for the county, on May 28, the day the ruptured section of pipeline was removed and later trucked to a laboratory in Ohio for testing.
PHMSA has said the ruptured pipeline was badly corroded, with some areas having pipe walls 1/16-inch thick, and had a hole approximately six inches long near the bottom of the pipeline.
It’s a 24-inch pipeline that carries crude oil from offshore oil platforms in southern Santa Barbara County and the May 5 In-Line Inspection conducted by Plains found that the failed pipe section had lost 45 percent of its original wall thickness, according to PHMSA.
The inspection found four areas with “pipe anomalies” and there was extensive corrosion on the outside of the pipe in the three areas investigated so far, according to PHMSA. The metal loss ranged between 54 percent and 74 percent of the original pipe wall thickness.
In regards to the estimated 1/16-inch thickness at the failed pipe, “This thinning of the pipe wall is greater than the 45 percent metal loss which was indicated by the recent ILI (In-Line Inspection) survey,” according to the report by PHMSA. There were three repairs done in the area of the failed pipeline, due to external corrosion, after a 2012 In-Line Inspection.
These photographs show a hole around eight inches long. Reitherman also observed two sites of the Plains pipeline that showed “anomalies” during in-line inspections that pointed to corrosion or some other form of metal loss. In the site pictured below, the pipe showed corrosion to the level that a clamp was temporarily installed.
— Noozhawk news editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
