Black Tide 1969
By Kira Redmond, Santa Barbara Channelkeeper

Santa Barbara, California is known for its beautiful beaches, stunning mountains-to-the-sea landscape, gorgeous weather and the deep blue treasures of the Santa Barbara Channel. The channel is home to blue, gray and humpback whales, southern sea otters, southern steelhead salmon and brown pelicans. The channel is not only rich in biodiversity but also in petroleum.

The first offshore oil well in the nation was drilled in the Santa Barbara Channel in 1896. The installation of others quickly followed. In 1968, in a scramble to fill rapidly dwindling coffers to finance the Vietnam War, the federal government conducted a massive oil development lease sale. Union Oil of California (now Unocal) and its partners Mobil, Texaco and Gulf paid $61.4 million for the lease of a three square mile tract five miles off the Santa Barbara coast. They quickly erected Platform A and drilled four wells. Union Oil then asked the U.S. Geological Survey for a waiver from federal well casing requirements to drill a fifth well. Well casings prevent oil and gas from escaping the well bore and flowing into surrounding geological formations. The waiver was inauspiciously granted.

On January 28, 1969, the crew of Platform A was pulling the drilling tube out of that fifth well when mud began to ooze up through the well shaft, indicating that something had gone awry below. They had struck a high-pressure gas pocket nearly a mile below the surface and tons of mud were forced out of the top of the well within minutes. Frantic crewmembers quickly capped the well. But it was too late to stop the surge of oil rising from below the ocean floor. The unlined walls of the well shaft collapsed, the oil flowed into the surrounding rock and opened massive gashes in the ocean floor. Oil boiled to the ocean surface at the rate of thousands of gallons per hour for more than a week, creating a slick that covered 800 square miles of ocean from the Channel Islands to the Mexican border.

For weeks images of oil-soaked birds and miles of beaches coated with thick black sludge were beamed into TV sets across the nation, sparking a widespread environmental consciousness that made environmental protection a major national issue.

The blowout, which ultimately released more than four million gallons of oil and blackened beaches along more than 40 miles of coastline, was dubbed the "ecological shot heard ,round the world." The blowout was a major catalyst for the birth of the modern environmental movement in the United States. In its wake, the first Earth Day in 1970 and numerous environmental groups were born and a wave of environmental legislation was enacted, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, which require future oil and gas leasing to undergo formalized environmental review. In 1990, the federal government instituted a moratorium on oil leasing in federal waters offshore of California; this moratorium has been extended through 2012. In 1994, a permanent statewide ban (the "California Sanctuary") was enacted to prevent any further oil leasing in state waters.

But the oil industry continues to cast a long shadow on California's coastline. In 2003, Santa Barbara Channelkeeper sued EPA for failing to issue new, stronger permits for the 22 existing oil platforms off the southern California coast. These platforms had been operating under expired permits, some of which were 20 years old. We prevailed and EPA issued updated permits that incorporate the key conditions that Channelkeeper and our allies sought. Platform operators must now meet both state and federal clean water standards.

Channelkeeper and our partners also prevailed in a lawsuit against the federal Minerals Management Service for extending 37 undeveloped federal oil leases off our shores without adequate environmental review. The court agreed, supporting the state's right to review the plan and ordering the federal agency to submit the lease extensions to the state Coastal Commission for review. The Minerals Management Service's environmental assessment found that extending the leases would pose no significant risks to the environment. So, in March 2005, Channelkeeper and our allies filed a legal challenge arguing that the agency violated the National Environmental Policy Act.

In August 2005 we won a double victory when the California Coastal Commission rejected the federal government's determination that extending the leases is consistent with the California Coastal Management Program. The following day, a federal district court ruled that the agency could not extend the leases until it completed full environmental review of all the potential environmental impacts.

Unfortunately, the federal government quickly appealed this decision. Meanwhile, another federal court ruled that the government was in breach of contract with oil companies and awarded restitution to the lessees. This remains under negotiation; but if the government pays restitution, the leases will be extinguished.

Today, pressure continues to mount for additional oil production in the Santa Barbara Channel. Several new oil projects have been proposed, including Venoco's plan to install a 175-foot drilling rig and drill 35 wells on the coast just above a harbor seal sanctuary and a public park in Carpinteria, ten miles south of Santa Barbara. Channelkeeper will continue to monitor and weigh in on any pending proposals to ensure that oil production in the Santa Barbara Channel is as clean and safe as possible and complies with all applicable environmental laws, so that another preventable disaster like the '69 blowout does not once again desecrate our precious coast. w