CalFire, the Office of the State Fire Marshal, and state Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant were hit with a double whammy on April 15, when environmentalists filed two separate lawsuits against them for their allegedly illegal issuance of state waivers to Sable Offshore to operate its oil pipelines without industry-standard corrosion protection.
This comes after a heated marathon meeting when the California Coastal Commission came to Santa Barbara guns-a-blazing, and imposed a more than $18 million penalty on Sable Offshore for alleged unpermitted work on the same oil pipelines.
Both suits claim that the Fire Marshal was required by law to hold a public hearing and conduct environmental review on Sable’s proposed oil operations before granting the waivers. It did not do so and instead approved Sable’s waiver applications in December 2024 after state legislators say they were promised a public meeting beforehand.
“The decision clearly conflicts with requirements under state and federal law and puts the California coast, wildlife, our communities, and local businesses in harm’s way,” said Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center (EDC), in a statement.
The EDC sued the Fire Marshal alongside the Sierra Club, Santa Barbara County Action Network, Santa Barbara Channelkeeper, and Get Oil Out. The Center for Biological Diversity filed a separate suit based on an ever-so-slight difference in its argument. It’s likely that the two cases, both filed in Santa Barbara Superior Court, will be consolidated into one. Sable was listed as a real party in interest in both cases.
State waivers are required when oil pipelines do not have a type of corrosion control called cathodic protection. When the pipeline at issue ruptured under a previous owner in the 2015 Refugio Oil Spill, federal agencies determined the cause to be ineffective cathodic protection. While this cannot be fixed without building an entirely new pipeline, the Fire Marshal can waive this safety requirement and implement others — in this case, more than 60 — to get Sable to an “as-safe or safer” operating status.
However, these conditions do not stop corrosion from occurring, the way cathodic protection might, the lawsuits state. Instead, the waiver conditions require increased testing and repair thresholds to handle corrosion after it inevitably happens.
“Sable is essentially abandoning a front-end, corrosion-preventing cathodic protection system and replacing it with an untested, kludged-together collection of risk management and monitoring procedures on the back end that are not consistent with public safety or protection of the environment or as safe as a properly designed pipeline,” one of the lawsuits, filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, read.
All plaintiffs are calling on a judge to order the Fire Marshal to rescind Sable’s state waivers until a public hearing and environmental review are conducted under the California Environmental Quality Act.
Sable Offshore did not provide a comment on the lawsuit by press time.
