---
title: "Months of Digging Ahead in East LA, Where a Drill Struck a Pipeline and 25,000 Gallons of Crude Went Into the Ground"
description: "The May spill at Cesar Chavez and Eastern was first put at 2,400 gallons. The figure is now about ten times that. County officials say the cleanup will run into 2027, and they are still waiting on the operator's soil testing."
category: "Los Angeles"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/los-angeles
author: "Desmond Clarke"
published: 2026-07-31T19:55:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-31T19:55:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/months-of-digging-ahead-in-east-la-where-a-drill-struck-a-pipeline-and-25-000-ga
tags: ["east-los-angeles", "oil-spill", "environment", "public-health", "la-county"]
---
# Months of Digging Ahead in East LA, Where a Drill Struck a Pipeline and 25,000 Gallons of Crude Went Into the Ground

The May spill at Cesar Chavez and Eastern was first put at 2,400 gallons. The figure is now about ten times that. County officials say the cleanup will run into 2027, and they are still waiting on the operator's soil testing.

On May 22, a crew boring a path for fiber-optic cable under the corner of Cesar E.
Chavez and Eastern avenues hit a 16-inch petroleum pipeline. The initial estimate
was 2,400 gallons of crude oil into the ground.

The current figure is about 25,000 gallons, and Los Angeles County officials now
say removing the contaminated soil will take until early next year,
[according to LAist](https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/contaminated-soil-from-east-la-oil-spill-could-take-months-to-remove-county-officials-say).

## Where it stands

"There is still some oil contamination at Cesar Chavez and Eastern Avenue," said
Mario Tresierras of the county fire department, whose Health Hazardous Materials
Division is one of the agencies overseeing the response along with county Public
Works, county Public Health, and state and federal regulators.

Mark Pestrella, the director of Public Works, put a date on it: "January of '27
would be a conservative completion date. This is going to be a fairly involved
cleanup and construction project."

The pipeline is operated by Plains All American. The county is waiting on the
company's soil testing report, due August 31, before it can plan the excavation in
detail. That sequencing is worth noticing: more than three months after the spill,
the work of determining how far the contamination has spread is not finished.

## What residents have reported, and what the county says

In the weeks after the spill, people living nearby reported odors severe enough to
cause headaches and nausea. Those odors have since subsided.

Barbara Ferrer, the county's public health director, says monitoring has not
detected ongoing health impacts. Her department has also cautioned that odors are
likely to return once excavation begins, because digging up oil-soaked soil
releases what the soil has been holding.

Both things can be true, and residents are entitled to hear them stated plainly
rather than reassured. An absence of detected impacts is not the same as an
assurance of no impact, particularly over a period when the size of the release
was being revised upward by a factor of ten.

## The unanswered question

Nobody has said who pays.

The reporting available does not establish whether Plains All American will carry
the full cost of remediation, whether the contractor whose drill struck the line
shares liability, or whether any of it lands on the county. For a cleanup running
into 2027 in a county under budget pressure, that is not a detail. It is the part
that determines how thoroughly the job gets done and how quickly.

## Why the location matters

This is a dense residential stretch of unincorporated East Los Angeles, built over
a subsurface layer of pipelines and utilities laid down across a century of
industrial use. The immediate cause here was a boring crew hitting a line while
installing telecommunications infrastructure, which is a routine job done routinely
across the region.

That is the durable lesson available so far, ahead of any investigation findings:
the map of what runs under these streets is only as good as the records, and the
consequences of the records being wrong are borne by whoever lives above them.

## Sources

- [Contaminated soil from East LA oil spill could take months to remove, county officials say](https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/contaminated-soil-from-east-la-oil-spill-could-take-months-to-remove-county-officials-say)