Judge James Herman admonished attorney Brett Morris to liven up his questioning of a key witness for Plains All American Pipeline Company, lest Morris — a prosecutor with California’s Office of the Attorney General — put the jurors to sleep. Thus far, the court case against Plains — facing 15 counts of negligence in connection with the Refugio Oil Spill of 2015 — has been an exceptionally slow slog as the prosecution lays out its case. Did the pipeline company’s conduct leading up to the spill — during which 144,000 gallons of crude from a burst Plains pipeline got into the ocean — and failure to contain it afterward qualify as criminal?
Just two days into the trial, one juror expressed confusion as to what the actual charges against the pipeline company were. Two weeks into it, Judge Herman wouldn’t allow prosecution witness Dr. Takashi Wada — Santa Barbara County’s former public-health director — to testify, finding that anything Wada had to say about the spill’s impact on human health was utterly irrelevant to any damage inflicted on sea creatures. Plains has been charged with killing sea creatures, not harming human health.
Even so, the prosecution team, which includes county prosecutor Kevin Weichbrod, managed to score points, painting Kathy Randall, the senior Plains administrator at the scene of the accident, as less than on top of things. Morris — whose laborious questioning of Randall sparked Judge Herman to warn against lulling jurors to sleep — got her to testify that she never called either of the state or federal agencies to which such spills should be reported. (Ultimately, Plains employee James Buchanon would notify the National Reporting Center more than two hours after the spill, exceeding the two-hour legal requirement for such notifications. Since then, the law has been tightened to require notification within an hour.) Randall testified that she tried calling Clean Seas, an oil-spill emergency-response crew established and funded by the oil industry, but that she had the wrong number.