TRACY, Calif. — Crews have repaired an oil pipeline that broke days ago and spilled up to 21,000 gallons of crude underground in rural Northern California, a spokesman for Shell Oil Co. said Tuesday.
The company was running small amounts of oil through the pipeline to test it as crews worked to clean up the spill in remote, undeveloped countryside near Tracy, about an hour east of San Francisco, Shell spokesman Ray Fisher said.
Oil was visible over about a 250-foot-by-40-foot stretch of land, but none of it spilled into waterways, Miryam Barajas, a spokeswoman with the state Water Resources Control Board, said Tuesday.
Additionally, groundwater reserves in the area of the spill are relatively deep, lessening the risk of contamination of underground water supplies, Barajas said.
A company command center noticed a problem with the pipeline Friday morning and shut it down within a minute, Fisher said. Shell believes a crack of up to 20 inches opened in the line, which is about 7 feet underground.
The company notified state and local agencies of the break within two hours, Fisher said.
State water board officials were in contact with local officials about the spill Friday morning, said Barajas, the water board spokeswoman.
Environmentalists are assessing the threat from the spill, including what wildlife could be affected, said Patrick Sullivan, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity.
In scale and threat, the release was “certainly nothing like the Santa Barbara spill” last year, when more than 120,000 gallons of oil from a broken pipeline flowed onto scenic coastline, Sullivan said.
