Orange County officials held a press conference on Monday to provide updates on oil spill recovery efforts in the Newport and Huntington Beach areas, including plans to remove oil residue from shorelines.
"We continue to do overflight assessments of the coastline," said U.S. Coast Guard Captain Rebecca Orr. "We know that there is oil off the coastline. Many of you have seen it showing up on the beaches in the forms of small quantities. We call them tar balls or patties. It’s the sticky oil that gets caught in the sand."
As of noon on Monday, officials had identified a general point of origin for the spill—a ruptured pipeline.
Martyn Willsher, CEO of Amplify Energy, the company that owns and administers the pipeline, said divers checked out over 8,000 feet of pipe and have isolated one area of "significant interest."
"We did this primarily through ROV to this point, but we are sending divers down now to verify," Willsher said. "There's more information to come, but I think we’re moving very closely to a source of a cause of this incident."
This is a developing story. KNX will update with additional information as it is received.
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