Crews in LA sop up 10,000-gallon oil spill

LOS ANGELES -- A 10,000-gallon crude-oil spill that occurred in Los Angeles early Thursday was expected to take 24 hours to fully clean up, officials said.

Firefighters responding to the spill shortly after 1 a.m. in the Atwater Village section of the city were able to hem in much of the oil by using loads of sand from a nearby cement company to build a damlike berm, creating a sort of "lagoon" that tanker trucks were emptying with their vacuum lines.

Those trucks also provided more accurate spill readings, which firefighters used to downgrade the spill's size after initially estimating it at 50,000 gallons.

Earlier, a burst pipe had sent a geyser 20 to 50 feet in the air, blasting the adjacent Gentlemen's Club, which had to evacuate, said Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Jamie Moore. Some 10 vehicles also were stuck in the club's lot because of the oil, he added.

Two people at a nearby medical center who complained of nausea, possibly caused by the oil, were transported to a hospital, Moore said.

By the time crews shut off the pipeline remotely, the spill had created pools of oil, some about 40 feet wide and knee-deep, in the largely industrial area, the Fire Department reported.

"It looked like a lake," Moore said.

Most of the oil was vacuumed up by 6 a.m., but more work will be needed to fully clean the spill, he said.

Moore said cleanup crews would use diaperlike sponges to sop what oil could not be vacuumed up by the tanker trucks. After that, he said, high-pressure hoses blasting a soap solution will be used to break up the remaining oil.

The entire cleanup will take up to 24 hours, Moore said.

The Gentlemen's Club will probably have to undergo extensive cleanup after oil spewed against its roof and a side wall, Moore said.

"We have five commercial structures, one being the Gentlemen's Club, being affected," he said. "The Gentlemen's Club actually has significant damage on the side of the building because of oil spraying on it."

The four other businesses were affected by street closures, but did not suffer significant damage, officials said.

The pipeline transports oil from Bakersfield, Calif., to Texas. It was not immediately clear what caused the rupture.

Line 2000 is one of two major lines that deliver crude from the San Joaquin Valley. Combined throughput on Line 2000 and Line 63, a second conduit between the valley and Los Angeles, was 125,000 barrels a day in the first quarter, according to a filing from Plains All-American Pipeline Co.

A 71-mile segment of Line 63 was shut in 2009 for repairs, and Plains was using the parallel Line 2000 to route crude from the north end of the out-of-service segment to the south end, the company said in a regulatory filing last year. The idled section was expected to return to service by mid-2015.

Information for this article was contributed by Jason Wells of the Los Angeles Times and by Eliot Caroom and Lynn Doan of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 05/16/2014

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