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Doing a line inspection saturday morning. he explained the pipeline is rout routinely inspected every other year and "meticulously maintained." we don't know how long it's been leaking. some people in the area say they started smelling oil as early as friday evening and as you mentioned, there are potentially 126,000 gallons spilled at this point, the entire capacity of the pipeline so at this point, there is no more to spill according to the ceo that we haven't seen more spillage since the initial report but it has come up to the shoreline and that's why we're seeing people beachgoers yesterd...

Stopped because all the oil has already leaked just remarkable. so chad, reference point, deepwater horizon spill back in 2010, many people remember that, the scale. that eventually was 4 million barrels of oil. so far here 3,000. can you give us a sense of the scale, but also the damage to this environment here? >> yes. 1,500 times more oil spill than deepwater horizon but that was a crude, thick oil, much of it didn't even get to the surface and is still laying on the bottom. this is a refined product, a lighter grade, which did rise to the surface and then was washed onto the beaches and mo...

Coastline. 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 patsp patties. that's starting to come ashore, and we're kocontinually assessi that. we know there's oil from huntington beach, and as far down from laguna, and likely continuing to move in a southerly direction based on the wind and the weather and the currents. we continue to increase our staffing at our incident command post as well as our personnel in the field. we've more than doubled the level of effort just since yesterday...

Cnn national correspondent natasha chen is live at huntington beach, so, natasha, what do we know about how the leak started? >> reporter: pamela, we don't know a whole lot about how this happened or even exactly what time this happened. because people started -- people have said that they started smelling things perhaps late friday. officials today told us they got their first report of it to them saturday morning. so this has been going on for at least a day or two now with people in the area smelling something not quite right, and people on the beach actually getting tar balls and oil stuck...

If you happen to make a trip to the Texas coast anytime soon and you see a black blob of gooey stuff, don't panic, it's just tar balls and apparently they happen naturally.