Three safety-related improvements generated from the 2021 oil spill off the coast of Orange County soon could become operating procedures:
First, the minimum distance between a commercial ship’s anchor and any oil pipeline operating in the San Pedro Bay, including off the coast of Orange County and Long Beach, should be expanded. The current minimum is 500 feet and the suggested new distance is expected to be 1,500 feet.
Second, underwater alarm systems connected to oil pipelines could be beefed up so that they can better alert marine-traffic controllers when a ship anchor drops nearby, and similar improvements could be made nationally.
Third, oil operators should be urged to always follow protocols for training and for employee drug testing after a spill or rupture is discovered.
The National Transportation Safety Board first said it planned to seek those improvements in a preliminary report on the spill released in early December. And all three ideas made it into that report’s final draft, which was made public Thursday, Jan. 25.
The NTSB’s findings offer something of a last word on the Oct. 1, 2021 spill that put a relatively small amount of oil (about 588 barrels, or 25,000 gallons) into the ocean, yet still managed to cause significant damage to one of the nation’s most popular and profitable stretches of coast. Oil that leaked out of an underwater oil pipeline, broken at a point roughly 4.75 miles off the coast of Huntington Beach, killed fish and other marine life, fouled local wetlands and closed commercial fishing and beaches from Orange County to as far south as San Diego.
The spill sparked national news about oil off the Orange County coast, damaging the region’s reputation. It also canceled the last day of the 2021 edition of the Pacific Air Show in Huntington Beach, a huge money-maker for the city and local businesses.
It also sparked lawmakers, in Sacramento and Washington D.C., to propose different ways to end or limit oil…
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