This month's spill was over 10 times larger than regulators in the 1970s predicted in the event of an anchor strike on the pipeline. Their miscalculation may have missed an opportunity to enact safeguards, experts say.
Some city dwellers who’ve moved to the high desert over the last year and a half looking for more space and clean air also found unexpected drawbacks.
Though anchor strikes are rare, severe weather is associated with their occurrence. Most offshore oil drilling infrastructure is designed to withstand so-called 100-year storms, giant rainfall events estimated to have a 1% chance of occurring at that location each year. But some climate experts warn that those predictions may not account for climate change, which is bringing more intense weather more often.
Off the Southern California coast, government regulators signed off decades ago on a plan to bury a section of the pipeline, which runs more than 15 miles between a processing platform called Elly and the shore. The buried section would run from the shore to the Long Beach breakwater. From there, the rest of the line lies on top of the seabed.
The analysis — included in an environmental impact report prepared in 1978 by the U.S. Geological Survey, the State Lands Commission and the Port of Long Beach — acknowledged that there was still a chance of an anchor strike along the unburied part of the line, which runs nearly 11 miles along the ocean floor.“There remains the possibility that the pipeline could be ruptured or pierced by an accident, such as an emergency or accidental anchoring,” the report said.
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