Beach tar balls traced to Santa Barbara spill

Heal the Bay staff scientist Sarah Sikich collecting a tar patty sample on a South Bay beach.

I guess there's no real surprise here. At least some of the tar balls and tar "patties" that washed up on Santa Monica Bay beaches after the oil spill north of Santa Barbara last month have been chemically tied to the same source. The globules of tar began to appear along beaches in Ventura, Los Angeles and Orange counties soon after the spill from a pipeline near Refugio and El Capitan states beaches before Memorial Day. Refugio remains closed.

From Heal the Bay:

Official testing results from three Manhattan Beach oil samples confirm our suspicion: Oil from the May 19 spill outside of Santa Barbara traveled over 100 miles to foul South Bay beaches. Now that the oil fingerprinting analyses have been authenticated, we are calling on regulators to assign responsibility and secure proper compensation for the environmental damages caused by Plains All American Pipeline.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) collected samples from the oil that washed ashore in Manhattan Beach on May 27, 2015. Physical and chemical analyses conducted by OSPR and an independent peer review indicated that the oil in the South Bay matched a source sample taken from the Plains All American spill at Refugio State Beach. Plains All American also took samples from Manhattan Beach and has now confirmed that two of those samples originated from the Plains All American spill as well.

Although Santa Barbara has taken the hardest hit, the spill’s impacts are being felt throughout Southern California.