How California's Worst Oil Spill Turned Beaches Black And The Nation Green

[Rhiannon12866]

On January 28, 1969, an oil well off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., experienced a blowout. The result was an oil spill that at the time ranked as the largest in U.S. waters.

The disaster, which made headlines across the nation, helped create the modern environmental movement. It also led to restrictions on offshore drilling — restrictions the Trump Administration is trying to loosen.

The events that led to the spill began one morning on Platform A, a rig located about six miles from the coast and operated at the time by Union Oil.

Workers had already drilled four wells from the platform and were drilling a fifth when they ran into a problem.

"You punch into some of these oil reservoirs and you get a lot of back pressure," says Douglas McCauley, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

McCauley has brought me out to Platform A on a boat, which circles the rig as he talks.

He tells me that in this case, the back pressure overwhelmed the well's safety systems. This allowed crude oil and natural gas trapped thousands of feet down to rocket toward the surface.

"So they're taking these big drilling pipes and shoving them back down the hole and these gigantic steel blocks on top of that to seal off this blowout," McCauley says. It worked, but only for a few minutes.

"They had capped off the blowout successfully," McCauley says. "But they created so much pressure at the bottom of this well that it actually broke open the seabed."


Much more: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/28/688219307/how-californias-worst-oil-spill-turned-beaches-black-and-the-nation-green



President Richard Nixon talked with workers cleaning up the oily beach at Santa Barbara in March 1969.
AP

[hunter]

1. When I was a kid our family went to a few "cleanups..."

... which seemed a bit futile even at the time, shoveling straw into the oil, and then throwing the oily straw into dumpsters.

The oil got everywhere. The seats of our family car were permanently stained, but that was okay, we never had "nice" cars

I won't forget the smell, and the oily birds dead and dying.

Bless my parents, they were always taking us places more reasonable people would NEVER take their children, which probably turned me and my siblings into the radicals we are today.