State agency worried over aging oil terminals at California ports
Sacramento officials, reviewing the health of California's waterfront petroleum terminals, are expressing serious concern over the condition of the aging port facilities.
“The disasters are out there waiting to happen,” Gary L. Gregory, chief of the California State Lands Commission’s Marine Facilities Division told the Associated Press.
Nearly 100 million gallons of petroleum products, including refined fuel, lubricants and crude oil, move through the state's 34 marine petroleum terminals each day.
While many of the facilities at the three main ports of Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland are newer, terminals at some of the smaller ports are more than 100 years old. Nearly all of the terminals were designed and built when ocean tankers were much smaller than today.
It took more than a decade for the State Lands Commission to find funding to study the problem and develop minimum safety standards for the facilities, the first of their kind in the nation. Last year, the commission obtained the power to enforce the new standards and levy fines of up to $250,000 for violations that are not corrected.
Once the commission completes its inventory of the most dangerous terminals next year, repairs on the facilities can be ordered.
And terminals in the rest of the nation are not “distinctly better or worse,” Larry Cunningham, a vice president at the New York-based marine engineering company Halcrow HPA, told the AP. “I would say there’s nothing unique about the facilities in California.”
State agency worried over aging oil terminals at California ports
