About 2 miles west of where Chiquita Canyon Landfill operators recently dealt with a leachate cleanup, state officials Friday said they were making good progress taking care of an unrelated oil spill that reached the Santa Clara River.
A contracted cleanup team from Patriot Environmental Services has been at the spill site — mostly in a dry creek bed north of the Santa Clara River and Henry Mayo Drive and east of San Martinez Grande Canyon Road — since Nov. 8.
A Department of Fish and Wildlife official said there’s been no observable direct impacts to wildlife from the spill, which was initially estimated to be approximately 400 gallons on Dec. 5.
Eric Laughlin, spokesman for the Office of Spill Prevention and Response in the DFW, wrote in an email Friday that was still close to the working estimate based on what was reported to the CalOES State Warning Center.
“The amount spilled is under investigation and can’t be accurately determined until quantification has been completed,” he wrote, adding “as far as how much longer cleanup operations will last, it’s unknown, but they will likely continue into January.”
West Energy Operating, which owns the oil field, indicated the facility has been in “response mode” since the leak was discovered.
The leak was believed to be from an idle line that had hundreds of gallons in it when a corrosive issue in a 3-inch pipe led to the incident. It was discovered after oil was observed downstream in the Santa Clara riverbed.
“We put a clamp on the line to secure the line and make sure there’s no further spill from the source. And then as a preventative maintenance measure, we just went through and isolated everything in the field. So, we shut down all of our wells, shut down the system,” according to Josh Kendrick, manager of operations for West Energy, in a Dec. 5 phone interview. “And so, we’ve been in response mode since then. We’ve been working to deploy our oil spill response organization and get the cleanup underway.”
