Plains All American Pipeline is on the hook for about $92 million in cleanup efforts, officials announced at a Wednesday press conference. The media event mimicked the dozen or so held the week after the May 19 Refugio Oil Spill — a handful of agencies representatives made brief statements to reporters before fielding questions.
But 37 days after Line 901 ruptured, many of those questions, including exactly when and where cleanup vessels arrived, remained unanswered. U.S. Coast Guard Captain Jennifer Williams said officials responded within the first 12 hours on May 19, and the number of personnel mushroomed to more than 1,100 cleanup crew members on the ground and about 350 people packed in the Unified Command post at the height of the response. This week, that number leveled to about 1,000 personnel total.
Likewise, officials could not elaborate on the news this week that samples of tarballs found about 100 miles south at Manhattan Beach matched sources from the spill. Williams said the testing process is complicated and being completed by the Department of Fish & Wildlife's Office of Spill Prevention and Response. Not all the results have been released because they are part of the ongoing investigation, she said, emphasizing that the Unified Command does not focus on this aspect, and the test results will not change the cleanup procedures. Plains also did its own testing and publicized that two South Bay samples matched sources from the spill.