If this sounds confusing, even regulators have problems. According to Railroad Commission reports, the pipe was eventually deemed to belong to Vintage Petroleum, which had a line in the vicinity. Vintage sent down a diver, who discovered that it wasn't the company's pipe after all, but one of the many abandoned or unmapped lines that lie across the bay bottom like spaghetti. The next day a commission inspector went to look at the scene but found no trace of oil. Pipe blowouts are actually common in Galveston Bay.
Lines corrode, and the wave and tidal action can cause breaks as well.
Spills from barges and leaky or sunken boats also happen regularly. Sometimes a sheen of unknown origin and size simply appears on the water. Exxon first reported that about 50 barrels of oil had spilled. By the time the spill was cleaned up more than a month later, the estimate had climbed to almost 3,000 barrels, or 126,000 gallons. And in an infamous 1990 incident, a barge collision in the Ship Channel released 700,000 gallons of crude, forcing temporary closure of the entire bay to fishing.