How UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute Researchers Helped Solve the 2021 Huntington Beach Oil Spill

This article was originally published in UCSB’s ‘The Current‘. 

Participating in a federal investigation was not on UC Santa Barbara marine biologist Mark Page’s agenda back in 2021, but after he got the call from the Coast Guard that October, he became part of a “dream team” of scientists and investigators that unraveled the mystery behind a spill that coated Huntington and Newport beaches with about 25,000 gallons of crude oil.

“Of course I was wondering how they got my name,” said Page, who thinks it was probably due to work he’d been doing in the area, studying invertebrate communities on oil platforms in the San Pedro Bay, just off the southern California coast near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. 

Page and his team are particularly interested in the dispersal of larvae of native and non-native invertebrates in the region and the connectivity of their populations between the platforms and nearby natural reefs. The work involves taking and analyzing samples on the platforms, the reefs and in the wider region to gain insight into whether platforms could facilitate the dispersal of these species to natural habitat and how the non-native species that live on the platforms could affect native reef-dwellers should they be dispersed to natural habitat.

He was engaged in this general research when the call came through, an urgent request to help solve a seafloor puzzle. 

Following reports of an oil slick floating in the waters off Huntington Beach on Oct. 2, 2021, the Coast Guard sent down an unmanned vehicle to find and document the scene of the spill, revealing evidence of a break in the casing of an oil pipeline on the seafloor leading to one of the oil platforms. Led by Special Agent Ketrin Adam, the FBI Los Angeles Field Office had gotten involved due to the severity of the spill, which killed more than a hundred birds and polluted sensitive habitats in addition to closing area beaches and interrupting a popular airshow. 

The FBI’s Underwater Search and Evidence Response Team (USERT) began by reviewing the video taken by the Coast Guard.

“Their working hypothesis was that the pipeline had been stretched by the anchors of  cargo ships hooking on the pipeline and pulling it,” Page recalled. “The pulling created a stress that broke the casing that covered the pipeline, and that ultimately weakened or created a crack in it that several months later actually resulted in the spill.”

While the investigators had a good picture of what had happened and how, the next missing puzzle piece was when, information which could serve as evidence for a potential criminal case against who was responsible.

“We knew the anchor drag theory was plausible,” said Assistant United States Attorney Matt O’Brien at a recent FBI Director’s Award event honoring the team who solved the case. But, he said, it was still a “real riddle” to figure out who might have done it, and whether it was an accident or an intentional act. “We were trying to be creative and use the best minds out there,” he said.

Fortunately, there was a potential lead. In reviewing the Coast Guard’s footage, USERT team leader Ty Summers noticed the presence of marine invertebrates — tube worms and barnacles — that had grown on the broken concrete and exposed pipeline. The investigators realized that they might have a means for establishing a timeline of events, and Page’s expertise in marine invertebrates would play a major role.

“Essentially, it’s a forensic analysis, similar to what would be done in cadavers using insects,” Page said. In forensic entomology, he explained, the size and composition of insects found on a dead body can tell how long the body has been dead. Except in this case the “body” was the broken oil infrastructure and the telltale insects were the invertebrates. Because these creatures are sessile — their adult forms are fixed in a single place — the idea was that it would be possible to determine by their stage in development how long ago the pipe had been dragged.

“They have planktonic larvae,” Page explained. “When the concrete casing that surrounded the pipeline broke and exposed the bare pipeline, barnacle larvae that happened to be present in the plankton settled on the pipeline.” Because there is reliable information in the scientific literature on the barnacle’s growth rate, he added, it would be possible to trace backward with some accuracy how long the creature had been there.