When I was growing up in SAN, my dad, brother and I went down to Lindbergh to watch the planes land and take-off. This was when you could get really close to the hold line at SAN at the base of runway 27.

One day, we say a World Airways DC-10 making its procession down Taxiway B to the hold line. We were watching it and were noticing a mist or stream coming out of its right wing. It came to a stop as #1 for departure, and then we could tell that there was fuel POURING out of the right wing and onto the taxiway.

Several other people noticed and we were waiving our arms to try to get their attention (a couple of them had ground and tower on the radio so we could tell if they got the message). They didn't.

Plane lined up on 27, did its roll, lifted off.

About 10 seconds later, a pilot from another plane contacted tower and asked "did you just see a stream of liquid coming off that DC10?" Tower replied that yah, they thought something was funny.

Airport security came tearing around the corner about 2 minutes later and inspected the pool (which was quite large) and confirmed that it was fuel. The crash unit came out of the fire house, along with several other craft to inspect.

IIRC, the plane was diverted to Miramar as the runway there was much less obstructed than Lindbergh.