(CN) — More than two years after an offshore oil pipeline burst off the coast of Huntington Beach, California, and wrapped some of the state’s most famous beaches in coats of crude oil, the National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday offered recommendations to prevent a similar incident.
Huntington Beach is known for its beaches and ties to surfing culture, but it’s also a historically productive oil reserve, both onshore and offshore in the San Pedro Bay. In the 1980s, drilling platforms were built in the bay with miles of pipeline going to Long Beach, and the San Pedro and Wilmington neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The bay also happens to be the site of one of the busiest international shipping ports in the world, the ports of LA and Long Beach.
In October 2021 an underwater oil pipeline more than four miles off the coast of Huntington Beach ruptured, ultimately leeching the equivalent of 2,400 gallons of oil into the bay. The spill led the city to close its beaches and cancel a popular air show, as well as the pollution of nearby wetlands, the death of 116 birds, damage to the threatened western snowy plover’s habitat, and a $160 million cleanup effort.
The major culprits of the spill, the NTSB said Tuesday, were two huge international container ships, the Beijing and MSC Danit, both of which were documented to be around the area where the pipeline was punctured in January 2021, nine months before the oil spill.
Both ships had been waiting to enter the ports of LA and Long Beach during the supply chain disruptions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic at the time.
While they waited, heavy winds hit the area. The Beijing then attempted to drop its anchor, but it didn’t hold onto the sea floor and the wind and the sea moved the ship across the pipeline at least 10 times with its anchor dragging. Later in the morning, the same thing happened to the MSC Danit.
“Although the Beijing passed over the pipeline numerous times with its anchor striking and damaging the pipeline, the ship did not pass over the eventual leak location. The MSC Danit, however, passed over the pipeline leak location several times while dragging an anchor,” said Andrew Ehlers, the chief investigator for the probe for the NTSB. “Further, staff found that although both ships' anchors struck, damaged and displaced the pipeline, the MSC Danit anchor's contact with the San Pedro Bay pipeline was the event that led to the eventual crude oil release.”
Cracks in the pipeline made by the ships dragging anchors went undetected, allowing them to fester and grow. The pipeline eventually failed nine months later, the board concluded.
The NTSB also found a lack of training and failures by the company that owns the pipeline to adequately respond to a number of leak alarms, and shut down and isolate the pipelines quickly enough.
On the night of the spill, alarms in the control room on Beta Offshore’s Elly platform indicated that there was a leak in the underwater pipeline. Staff initially assumed they were false alarms. After troubleshooting for a number of hours, with the alarm restarting a number of times, the crew eventually manually checked.
Beta Offshore is a subsidiary of Amplify Energy.
Platform crew told NTSB investigators said they had not been trained on the leak detection system, despite the company’s written procedures that require the training. The probe also revealed the controllers were probably working while tired and fatigued, since the controller in charge took two shifts with little rest because the employee who was supposed to be there couldn’t get to the offshore platform. Some staff worked for 14 hours while trying to figure out what was wrong.
“I find that a bit troubling. If the alarms are constantly having problems, that tells me they are not serving their function, because you are desensitizing the pipeline controllers to what is going on, it is a false alarm," NTSB member Bruce Landsberg said. "In aviation, we looked at this a long time ago and said this is unacceptable and we have got to work on it."
NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy listed a number of other similar oil spill incidents throughout the last three decades in places like Tennessee, Washington state and Michigan, where inadequate training caused oil to continually spill while alarms were going off and staff attempted to figure out what was going on.
Quoting an MIT expert, Homendy said, "'Human error is a system that needs to be redesigned.’ I could not agree more."
The board proposed a number of recommendations to prevent similar oil spills, like implementing a new vessel traffic rule in the San Pedro Bay to make the ports of LA and Long Beach safer, developing a ship monitoring system that has visual and audio alarms when a ship’s anchor comes close to a pipeline, a service that notifies pipeline operations after a potential incursion on a pipeline by a ship, and auditing Beta Offshore’s drug testing program, because the staff on the platform the night of the spill had not been tested for drug use.
Since the spill, Amplify has been sued by a number of entities, including a class action brought by fishers, tourist companies, homeowners and other locals that settled with the company for $95 million in September.
The Orange County Register reported this past April that the oil pipeline was expected to reopen that month.
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