Cleanup crews scrambled to contain a nine-square-mile spill on a rural stretch of the California coastline on Wednesday, following a pipeline break that dumped up to 105,000 gallons of crude on land and into the ocean, blackening a popular state beach.

Darren Palmer, the chairman and CEO of Plains All-American Pipeline, a Houston-based company, told reporters Wednesday evening that an estimated 21,000 gallons of crude may have reached the water. The cause of the leak has not been identified, Palmer said, but shortly before the accident, he said, the company had “mechanical issues” with its pumping units.

Until then, Palmer said, the pipeline had not malfunctioned since 1987, when it was built to carry processed crude from processing plants on the coast to refineries in Texas.

“We deeply regret that this incident has occurred at all,” Palmer said. “We apologize for the damage it has done to the environment. We apologize to the residents and visitors for the inconvenience it has caused, especially on this Memorial Day weekend.”

Some of the spilled oil found its way through a highway storm drain into the ocean near Refugio State Beach, 25 miles west of Santa Barbara.

“The smell absolutely burned your throat, your nose, made you dizzy and gave you a headache,” said Leslie Freeman, who runs a cattle ranch about a quarter-mile from Refugio. “It came up the beach and the canyon and settled around our house and barn.”

Freeman said his daughter and granddaughter spent the night in a hotel in Goleta, about 15 miles east of the ranch, to escape the fumes. More than 270 workers were deployed Wednesday to comb the beaches for injured wildlife and begin cleanup operations, US coast guard officials said. There is no estimate yet on the number of oiled birds and marine mammals that have been rescued.

The Refugio spill is much smaller than the 3 million-gallon oil spill that struck the Santa Barbara waterfront in 1969 and gave birth to the environmental movement in the United States.

But environmentalists said this latest accident hit hard, because it is soiling the Gaviota coast, a rare Mediterranean-climate region where northern and southern plants and wildlife meet. There are only five such regions in the world, all of them located at the western edges of continents and all of them unique for their biological diversity.

Because it has not been urbanized, the Gaviota coast region, which stretches from Goleta to the northern boundary of the Vandenberg air force base, also has been viewed as the healthiest remaining coastal ecosystem in southern California – at least, until now.

“The Gaviota coast is a global resource that needs to be attended to with greater respect and restraint,” said Phil McKenna, president of the Gaviota Coast Conservancy, a nonprofit group that sought and failed to win a national park designation for the area during the administration of President George W Bush.

“When I saw that first image of oil oozing out of the bluffs, it was a nightmare.”

By mid-afternoon, about 15 workers at Refugio in white paper suits were throwing bags of contaminated kelp and blobs of tarry oil onto a large pile for pickup and disposal. A brisk wind onshore wind was blowing, and much of the oil had floated off the sand with the tide, leaving a black ring of tarred rocks along the shore.

A flock of pelicans was fishing in the area, raising the possibility that the birds might get over-chilled in the cold water if their oily feathers clumped together, said Dennis Chastain, an oil prevention specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

One of the biggest challenges, he said, will be cleaning up blackened rocks on the cobble beach above the tidal zone. One approach is to deluge them with water, and another, more time-consuming, is to hand-clean them, he said. Fish and Wildlife and the Coast Guard were leading the cleanup operations.

Several boats and helicopters were deployed off the coast today to identify patches of slick where a cleanup vessel could drive through, mopping up the oil, or set out floating booms to contain the oil. Three thousand feet of containment boom were deployed on Wednesday, officials said.

Chastain said he expected Refugio to remain closed through Labor Day.

The loss of Refugio’s palm-studded campground and sandy beach for unknown weeks or months to come will also be a blow for the surfers who ride the waves of the protected cove, and for the paddle boarders who cross the waters from Refugio to El Capitan state beach, a world-class surfing spot now in the path of the oncoming spill. The El Capitan campground and beach have been evacuated, though it is not yet clear whether the slick has reached the beach.



“When you’re out in the ocean anywhere along the Gaviota coast, you don’t see cars or buildings much,” said Ken Palley, a member of the executive committee of Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to preserve public access to the beach.

“You are out in this pristine ocean wilderness, and you feel like you’re going back in time. Now it’s going to be disgusting and horrible and nasty and poisonous. It shows how poorly the oil industry regulates itself.”

Fishermen, though, are not so concerned. In mid-June they will begin plying the waters of this coast a mile offshore for halibut and sea cucumber, and they say they’re used to oil slicks. A natural oil seep lies about a mile below the Refugio spill and trawlers regularly fish there, blackening the sides of their boats, said Mick McCorkle, president of the Southern California Trawlers Association, a group of 15 small trawlers.

“It doesn’t affect fishing on the bottom at all,” he said.