GOLETA, Calif. — Refugio State Beach is one of the treasures of the California coast, a little-known curve of beach in the hills that on weekends like this one — Memorial Day — would be sprinkled with people who made their way up from Santa Barbara, about 20 miles down the Pacific Coast.
But not on Thursday. Refugio was filled not with vacationers, but with teams of workers in white coveralls and masks, scooping up sand fouled with oil that had washed in after a pipeline broke earlier this week.
The smell of oil, not surf, was in the air as Coast Guard riggers off shore, using yellow buoys, tried to corral and clean up the oil before it reached the shore.
“I do want to manage expectations — cleanup doesn’t happen overnight,” said Capt. Jennifer Williams of the Coast Guard, who is heading the response. “These types of things continue on perhaps even for months.”
As oil spills go, this is hardly the worst that Santa Barbara County has faced.
The area has long had the unlikely juxtaposition of stunning beaches and hills facing oil derricks out in the water.
As of Thursday afternoon, it appeared that 21,000 gallons of oil had spilled into the water from the broken pipe before it was shut down, a far cry from the three million gallons lost in a 1969 spill that has been widely credited with starting the environmental movement.
Yet the distress was real, etched in the faces of longtime residents and on once-pristine beaches stained with oil.
Damage to wildlife seemed limited so far, but with the oil slick stretching to nine miles along the coast, concern was high that more damage could be done. Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in this region on Wednesday evening.
For this tourism-dependent area, the response has been split between heartfelt environmental concern and fear that outsiders will get the wrong idea and stay away, even though the spill is northwest of Santa Barbara and the city is unaffected.
“We hope the media can start to parse the issue of where the location is, so we don’t have the economic impact,” said Ken Oplinger, president of the Chamber of Commerce of the Santa Barbara Region.
Aaron and Kate Dulmaine of Boston were camping in El Capitan Canyon before a wedding they planned to attend. “We flew into San Francisco and heard people talking about it, but it didn’t seem real and we didn’t know where it was,” Ms. Dulmaine said.
“But when we got here, we could certainly smell it,” Mr. Dulmaine said, adding, “It’s pretty awful.”
The Coast Guard reported that almost 400 people were involved in the round-the-clock cleanup effort. Thousands of feet of floating booms have been deployed to contain the oil and protect shoreline areas where birds nest and marine mammals come ashore.
The owner of the broken line, Plains All American Pipeline, estimated that up to 105,000 gallons of crude oil were released underground with the rupture, with about a fifth of that reaching the ocean. Patrick Hodgins, the company’s senior director for safety, cautioned that the figures could change.
At a news conference, Mr. Hodgins, who joined Plains just last month, declined to respond to reports that his company had a worse-than-average rate of safety infractions.
Rick McMichael, senior director of operations at Plains, said the company had begun using heavy machinery to remove hundreds of cubic yards of contaminated soil around the pipeline. Until that is done, the cause of the break cannot be determined.
On Thursday morning, officials from state and federal agencies and the pipeline company took a helicopter flight over the area to assess the spread of the oil. They said it appeared not to have flowed southeast, toward Santa Barbara, since late Wednesday, when the Coast Guard said slicks in the water stretched nine miles. Instead it appeared to have moved farther out to sea.
The State Department of Fish and Wildlife has banned fishing for up to a mile on either side of Refugio and up to half a mile offshore. Department officials said Thursday that so far, they had recovered five brown pelicans hurt by the oil but no marine mammals; the waters are home to an array of shore birds, seals, sea lions, otters and whales.
The pipe that ruptured on Tuesday, a few hundred yards inland, carries crude from offshore drilling rigs, and the stretch that broke links a tank farm in Las Flores to a pumping facility in Gaviota. Some of the escaped oil seeped through the soil and into a storm drain, then flowed out to sea.
The 24-inch-diameter line was installed in 1987. Plains said that at the time of the rupture, oil was flowing through it at a rate of 54,600 gallons an hour.
Oil pipelines are usually designed with a 25-year life span, so age and pipe maintenance should be factors in the inquiry into the pipe failure, energy experts said. They said California’s seismic activity could have played a part, too.
Cleanup crews picked up oil-contaminated sand bags at Refugio State Beach on Thursday, part of the ongoing cleanup effort following the spill from a broken pipe.
“If I inspect the pipeline today and there is an earthquake 20 miles away a day later, it doesn’t take more than a quarter-inch shift of the ground to compromise the pipe’s integrity,” said Ed Hirs, a University of Houston finance professor who is an expert on oil transportation.
Energy experts said the spill resembled several pipeline ruptures in California, Montana, Arkansas and elsewhere in recent years, more than it did larger maritime disasters like the wreck of the tanker Exxon Valdez off Alaska in 1989 or the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig failure in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Yet this latest accident could have large ramifications for the oil industry because of the symbolism of its location near the 1969 blowout. It also comes at a time when the oil divestiture movement is spreading on college campuses and environmentalists are pressuring the Obama administration to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil sands production from Canada to the Gulf Coast.
“This is a pivotal spill at a pivotal moment,” said Amy Jaffe, executive director of energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis.
The spill galvanized people in Santa Barbara who have had oil drilling around their community for nearly a half-century, with many pointing to this latest spill, no matter how relatively modest, as a reason the practice should end.
They gathered around the Santa Barbara courthouse, holding placards in protest.
Plains All American operates through the United States and Canada, running 18,000 miles of pipelines and terminal networks that carry and store four million barrels of oil and natural gas liquids daily. It reported $878 million in profit last year.
According to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the overall pipeline system run by the Plains All American subsidiary that operates the damaged pipe was responsible for nearly $24 million in property damages in over 175 oil pipeline spills and incidents, including 11 in California, over the last 10 years. It was fined $284,500 in enforcement actions.
The subsidiary runs a total of 6,437 miles of pipeline in 16 states, 20 percent in California.
“Plains Pipeline had a 14 percent higher rate of incidents per mile of pipeline than the national average rate,” said Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit watchdog group.
