By Roy L Hales

There are an average of 5 oil, or gas, incidents a week; more than 3 million gallons are spilled in the US spilled every year. The US has more oil spills than we thought and the number doubled after production increased six years ago.

(The numbers are worse in Canada, see the bottom of the page).

8,000 “Significant” Incidents

Richard Stover, PhD, and the Center for Biological Diversity counted nearly 8,000 significant incidents, between 1986 and 2014, in records of the pipeline safety administration. By “significant” they mean causing injury, death, damages exceeding $50,000 in value, a loss of 5 barrels of highly volatile substances, 50 barrels of other liquids or there was an explosion. There have been more than 500 human deaths and 2,300 injuries through-out that period. The number of plant and animal casualties is far higher. The known property damages are valued at close to $7 billion.

Though most pipeline failures occur where there is a long history of development, they occur through-out the Lower 48. Texas is the worst offender, with 1657 incidents. California had 621 and 48 deaths.

The leading causes of incidents are excavation damages (24.3%), corrosion (18.2%) and equipment failure (17.1%).

After A Pipeline is 20 Years Old

Kristen Monsell, from the Center for Biological Diversity said the possibility of a spill “doubles after a pipeline is 20 years old.”

(Plains All American pipeline 901, which burst near Santa Barbara, was commissioned in 1993.)

“Scientists tell us that we will never know how many animals have been killed (by the Santa Barbara spill) … (Many animals) will sink to the bottom of the ocean. We’ll likely be seeing the impact for years and years to come,” said Monsell.

Animal Casualties

“The day after the oil spill, a report came out that dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico are still dying as a result of the Deep Horizon spill (in 2010). When dolphins swim through oil soaked waters, they breath in toxic fumes from the hydro-carbons. That cause lesions on their lungs and these animals were dying from lung disease.”

The statistics for Deep Horizon are numbing: 128 dead or affected dolphins and whales, 1,146 sea turtles and more than 8,200 birds were collected. There is no tally fish or plant life. Scientists believe these statistics are only a small fraction of the actual casualties. The Center for Biological Diversity calculated the real figures are probably closer to:

• 82,000 birds
• 6,000 sea turtles
• 25,900 marine animals
• much larger quantities of fish, shrimp, crabs and other sea life

There were much fewer known casualties at Santa Barbara. As of June 17, close to 400 birds and animals have been taken in. This included 186 dead birds and 95 dead mammals, but not the victims that were not found. We will never know the actual total for marine, bird and animal casualties.

It is even more difficult to calculate the actual number of dead and injured fish, birds and animals  from all 8,000 spills. It could easily be hundreds of thousands, probably millions.

Off California’s Coast

Monsell wonders about some of the aging infrastructure off California’s coast.

She added, “The pipeline associated with platform Holly, is in the state waters of California, is 42 years old. When it was constructed they expected to decommission the pipeline and the platform in 2015, or 2020. So we are getting to the end of the lifespan of a lot of these pipelines and associated infrastructure. If we’ve learned anything from the Santa Barbara spill, it’s that all of this infrastructure needs to be decommissioned and we need to move towards clean and sustainable sources of energy.”

Meanwhile, In Canada

• Click on this link to access a list of 7 significant oil spills on Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, which carries bitumen from  the Alberta oil sands to  British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. It is then loaded on tankers.
• Statistics from Emergency Management BC show the number of spills of “dangerous goods” into BC waters has been an average of 845 per year, more than twice a day, for the past 15 years.
• A number of US authorities have expressed concern about proposals to increase tanker traffic through British Columbian waters because “Canadian standards to clean up a major spill are decades behind those of the US.”
  
• Global news reported that, according to a  database of spills recorded by the Energy Resources Conservation Board, there were 28,666 crude oil spills in the province of Alberta between 1972 and 2012. This works out to about two incidents every day.

Top Photo Credit: Fire triggered by a gas pipeline explosion by Fiveflower via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)

Videos courtesy Center For Biological Diversity