The type of crack seen in the Coast Guard video is big enough to allow some oil to escape to potentially trigger the low pressure alarm, Kuprewicz said. Federal and state rules require immediate notification of spills. and didn't report the leak to the Coast Guard until 9:07 a.m. Saturday but say the company didn't shut down the pipeline until 6:01 a.m. Federal pipeline safety regulators have put the time of the incident at 2:30 a.m. by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. and was reported to the Coast Guard after 2 a.m. A satellite image shot by the European Space Agency indicated a likely oil slick in the area around 7 p.m. A foreign ship anchored in the waters off Huntington Beach reported to the Coast Guard that it saw a sheen longer than 2 miles just after 6 p.m. Questions remain about when the oil company knew it had a problem and delays in reporting the spill. People enjoy the beach in the background as workers clean the contaminated sand. A 4,000-foot section of the pipeline was dislodged 105 feet, bent back like the string on a bow, Amplify's CEO Martyn Willsher has said. The leak occurred about 5 miles offshore at a depth of about 98 feet, investigators said. The ship was cleared to depart Oakland was headed to Mexico. Afterward, the Coast Guard called the company to say the Rotterdam no longer was under scrutiny for the spill, Haupt said. The Coast Guard interviewed the captain and crew and was provided access to the logbook showing the ship's locations, according to Nils Haupt, a spokesman at Hapag-Lloyd's headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. Hapag-Lloyd, the shipping company that operates the vessel, confirmed Thursday that investigators boarded the ship while it was docked at the Port of Oakland in San Francisco Bay. The Rotterdam was the ship anchored closest to the pipeline last week. Coast Guard investigators boarded the massive German-flagged container ship Rotterdam Express to determine if it was involved in the spill. Officials said Wednesday they were investigating whether a ship waiting to offload its cargo might have had something to do with the leak. But it also told federal investigators the total amount may only be 29,400 gallons. Amplify has said publicly that no more than 126,000 gallons leaked. The Coast Guard is investigating whether a ship's anchor might have hooked and bent the pipeline. The cause of the spill is under investigation by numerous agencies as the cleanup continues along miles of shoreline on the Orange County coast south of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Workers walk by as dead marine life washed up after the oil spill.
Amplify Energy, a Houston-based company that owns and operates three offshore oil platforms and the pipeline south of Los Angeles, said it didn't know there had been a spill until its workers detected an oil sheen on the water Saturday at 8:09 a.m. These crack-type releases are lower rate and can go for quite a while." When pipes experience a catastrophic failure the breach typically is much bigger, what's referred to in the industry as a "fish mouth" rupture because it gapes wide like the mouth of a fish, he said. "An opening of this type, on a 17-mile-long underwater pipe is very hard to spot by remote indications. "My experience suggests this would be a darned hard leak to remotely determine quickly," Kuprewicz said. The 13-inch-long narrow gash could explain why signs of an oil slick were seen Friday night but the spill eluded detection by the pipeline operator until Saturday morning, said Richard Kuprewicz, a private pipeline accident investigator and consultant. Video of the ruptured pipeline that spilled tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil off Southern California shows a thin crack along the top of the pipe that could indicate a slow leak that initially was difficult to detect, experts said Thursday. Workers clean the contaminated beach in Newport Beach, Calif., after a major oil spill off the coast.
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