LOS ANGELES — The Coast Guard is investigating whether a large commercial ship set anchor in the wrong location, damaging an oil pipeline and causing a spill that threatens Laguna Beach, Newport Beach and other Orange County coastal cities, an official familiar with the investigation said Monday.
The pipeline was dragged as much as 150 feet by the anchor, the official said. Vessels are given anchor points to ensure pipelines are avoided. Coast Guard investigators are examining whether the ship’s captain was aware of the dragging.
Earlier Monday, Martyn Willsher, president and chief executive of the pipeline operator’s parent company, said that a ship’s anchor striking the pipeline was “one of the distinct possibilities” for the spill.
No additional details were provided.
At the time, the Coast Guard said it was investigating that as one possible scenario, but officials did not present evidence suggesting an anchor could be the cause.
“We have examined more than 8,000 feet of pipe and we have isolated one specific area of significant interest,” Willsher, the Amplify Energy Corp. executive, told reporters. “We did this primarily through [remotely operated vehicles] to this point, but we are sending divers down now to verify what we were seeing. There’s more information to come, but I think we’re moving very closely to the source and the cause of this incident.”
An anchor was the culprit in another large oil spill in Huntington Beach in 1990. An oil tanker punctured by its own anchor released some 400,000 gallons of crude oil into the ocean off the beaches in February that year. The spill killed about 1,000 birds and shut down nearly 15 miles of beaches on the coast for three weeks, the state’s attorney general said in a 1999 announcement of a $16-million settlement with the company, Attransco. Cleanup costs reached as high as $35 million.
Environmentalists have long criticized the general safety and maintenance of aging offshore oil platforms and have pointed to those factors as possible causes for the massive leak.
Cargo ships heading to the ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach frequently pass through the area where the spill occurred, officials said. During the pandemic, the Southern California coast saw gridlock as dozens of container ships at a time waited to get into the ports. It was unclear, however, how close those containers got to the offshore oil systems.
The spill, first reported Saturday morning, originated from a pipeline running from the Port of Long Beach to an offshore oil platform known as Elly. The failure caused roughly 126,000 gallons of oil to gush into the Catalina Channel, creating a slick that spanned about 8,320 acres. The spill has left striations of crude along stretches of sand in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach, killing fish and birds and threatening ecologically sensitive wetlands in what officials are calling an environmental catastrophe.
The oil will likely continue to encroach on Orange County beaches and environmentally sensitive habitats for the next few days, officials said.
Coast Guard officials are flying over the spill three to four times a day to map the oil’s direction and compare it with tides, currents and winds to project the potential impact on beaches south of Laguna in the coming days. County and local officials say they’re poised to close more of the coast and the Dana Point harbor, if necessary.
“It really is dependent on the prevailing weather conditions, but the oil continues to move in a southerly direction,” said Capt. Rebecca Ore, commander of the Coast Guard’s Los Angeles-Long Beach sector. “What we’ve seen is oiling just down to Dana Point … and the trajectories indicate that trend could continue if the weather continues in the current fashion.”
Laguna Beach closed city beaches Sunday night after projections showed the spill reaching Crystal Cove by 10 p.m. That beach is now closed, but no oil had been reported along that stretch as of Monday afternoon. Officials say that could change depending on ocean currents.
Just three miles south, in Laguna Beach, residents woke up to clusters of oil washing up along the sand.
Jean Fallowfield, who has lived in Laguna Beach for 30 years, was angry to see the oil making its way onto the beach near Divers Cove, where she often runs with her dog, Calypso.
