(Reuters) – A federal grand jury has accused Amplify Energy Corp and two of its subsidiaries with illegally discharging oil during a pipeline break in California in early October by acting negligently, including failing to properly respond to multiple alarms over a more than 13-hour period.
The Department of Justice, in a statement released on Dec. 15, said the indictment alleges that the companies, which own and operate the 17-mile-long San Pedro Bay Pipeline, failed “to properly respond to eight alarms from an automated leak detection system that were activated between 4:10 p.m. on October 1 until the final alarm at 5:28 a.m. the following day.”
The indictment also accuses Amplify and its Beta Operating Co LLC and San Pedro Bay Pipeline Co subsidiaries of “shutting down and then restarting the pipeline five times after the first five alarms were triggered on October 1, resulting in oil flowing through the damaged pipeline for a cumulative period of more than three hours.”
The oil spill left fish dead, birds mired in petroleum and wetlands contaminated, in what local officials called an environmental catastrophe.
An estimated 25,000 gallons of crude oil were discharged from a point approximately 4.7 miles west of Huntington Beach from a crack in the 16-inch pipeline, the statement said.
An earlier report by the Associated Press showed how the spill was not investigated for nearly 10 hours.
(Reporting by Seher Dareen in Bengaluru; Editing by Leslie Adler)
