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Thousands of gallons of crude oil spilled over a half-mile area in Los Angeles on Thursday due to a break in an above-ground Plains West Coast pipeline, the city fire department said.

The spill was 10,000 US gallons, according to Jamie Moore, a public information officer with the Los Angeles Fire Department…The cleanup was under way this morning, with crews vacuuming up most of the crude.

Four people at a nearby business were evacuated with respiratory complaints, and two people were transferred to a hospital…

The pipeline was shut off remotely, and the incident shut down a section of the Atwater Village area of the city…

“Oil is knee-high in some areas,” the fire department said. “A handful of commercial businesses are affected.”

The break in the 20-inch pipeline was at a pumping station in an industrial area near San Fernando Road in Atwater Village, the fire department said.

The pressure was so high and the volume of oil pushed through was so large that the oil didn’t stop rushing from the broken pipeline for 45 minutes.

Video footage from the NBC affiliate showed oil spraying about 20 feet in the air from the leak, which happened at an oil-gathering station situated next to a strip club, The Gentlemen’s Club, which was evacuated, according to media reports…

The Plains West Coast pipeline is run by Plains Pipeline L.P., a unit of Plains All American. A company spokesman did not immediately return a call outside normal business hours…

L.A. Battalion Chief David Spence told local television that the line ran from California’s main oil-producing region near Bakersfield to a storage facility in Long Beach, near a cluster of refineries including those run by Phillips 66, Valero and Tesoro…

I worked in and around the oil industry for a long enough spell to generally respect the safety of most pipelines, long-or-short-haul. I’m beginning to wonder about the quality and frequency of inspections – given the number of reported failures we’re getting to. Because the folks up top know damned well what the dangers are. Do they have accountants and lobbyists on board offering assurances about the cost of disasters, nowadays?

Thanks, Mike