Most salient point of the whole Gaviota pipeline mess is highlighted in Robert Almy’s op-ed “County: Stand Up for Your Rights” that you published in The Independent earlier, with the actual picture of the holes in the corroded pipe.
As Mr. Almy points out the original pipe was imported from outside the United States, and the engineering specs and constitution of the steel remains unknown to anyone outside ExxonMobil to this day. The environmental consequences of the corrosion of the almost 40-year-old pipe are only too real to Santa Barbara County residents. The ludicrous claim that the oil company can somehow detect “anomalies” in 120 miles of pipe, and repair them, is an argument as full of holes as Swiss Cheese.
