Our Vanishing Wilderness; 6; Santa Barbara: Everybody's Mistake

The following program is from NET. The following program is from NET. It was May of 1968 and the grieves had returned to the Northern Prairies. They came back with all of the noisy waterfowl that traditionally used this rich continental

heartland as a nursery for their young, seeking like the others secluded places to nest in the tall tulis, and playing out their courtship antics on the open stages of the ponds and lakes. Everything happened as usual until the breeding season was over and they migrated as usual down to the sea and then they died. The trouble began not far from a landmark on the coast of Southern California, the old

Franciscan mission of Santa Barbara. Almost under the eyes, so to speak, of the patron saint of animals. From Mission Ridge, you can see Platform A, which blew out on January 28, 1969. The platform and its two sister rigs rest on easily on an earthquake zone. Dr. Gordon McDonald explains why. If you look under Platform A, you would find, as you go down, that the rocks, for the most part, are bent up in what is called in geology and anticlimed and it was this structure that of course attracted the oil companies because under the dome, the oil was trapped. That day in January, the rig grew lost control of the drill pipe as it was being pulled up from the depth of more than 3,000 feet and the enormous pressures from below sent gas and oil up through the cracked and crumpled seafloor. The explosion released a broad, iridescent slick 12 miles long. Now with 2020 hindsight, we can say it was all a mistake.

There should have been more knowledge, more regulations. Stuart Udall, who was Secretary of Interior in 1968 when the federal leases were sold, later called Santa Barbara his Bay of Pigs. Within 24 hours, the oil and the bodies of birds caught in the oil began to come ashore. On the sixth day, the black tide swept into Santa Barbara Harbor and fouled the holes of hundreds of boats. It adhered to rocks and the shells of shore crabs and other creatures living on the rocks. But the birds with their oil feathers were the most helpless. Eleven days later, when the well was finally plugged, about 2 million gallons of oil shrouded the shore. Fritz Springman of Union Oil had this to say.

About four days after the leak started at Santa Barbara, the oil began to come ashore. The first job we got into was a rescue and cleaning of birds. We sent a group of men from our research department, plus their equipment, up the coast, oil, I'd say probably two days after the accident happened. Their first job was to go along the beaches, to gather birds, and then to set up a bird cleaning station in Carpenteria. That station was manned and we used it until, well I guess we're about the next two months. The plight of the oiled birds brought all kinds of people to the rescue. For the oil man, the job was strictly out of school. How often does a research chemist see a wild green close up, unless it's sick? But they got interested, like the kids.

And before long, they were skilled at catching birds. And to respect those sharp bills, they learned something else too, first hand. Oil and birds don't mix, oil and diving birds anyway. This surf scotter and the other victims on the beach were so thickly coated that they could no longer swim or fish or fly. Next stop, bird bath. To get oil out, you have to use a detergent. Don Clark and other Union oil chemists at the Carpenteria beach station tried them all. This is Polycomplex A11, a relatively mild compound. The problem is that after the washing, the grieve can't float.

The detergent, any detergent, takes away natural oils and the feathers, and the grieve's water proofing is gone. Then there are the effects of handling that these birds don't die from shock of being handled. All that washing and scrubbing will break up the fine structure, the little interlocking barbs of the feathers that keep their bodies insulated and warm when wet. With their natural insulation gone, the survivors must be dried quickly under the heat lamps to prevent pneumonia. None of them could swim or fly, so they couldn't be released. Next stop, child's zoo, and the casualties mounted, too, today. How many tomorrow? It seems like most of the deaths of the grieves as far as I can tell came from starvation. From the beginning of the emergency, biologists Susan Black was involved in the rescue. Most in washing birds that were brought directly to the zoo from the beaches. Then in caring for those that came in from the carpenteria station, 3,600 all together.

Birds that were brought in were western grieves, eared grieves and horned grieves, double-crested comrades, surf scoters, common muggansers, ready ducks, and we were really concerned that they wouldn't be willing to eat that fish, but there was very little problem with that at all. They seemed to recognize immediately that fish alive were dead. It was pretty free eating. The surf scoters seem very hearty. We lost very few of those. We just learned it by trial and error. For a while, we wet them down, and let them pre-union dry out, and we wet them down with them pre-union dry up. But great many of the birds died, and it seemed that they died of starvation. When they're wet, their body temperature drops, much faster than they can eat. And they weren't able to eat enough to keep themselves from starving and death. The quamerons are exceptionally hearty, but then they're wet birds.

Anyway, it was stand being wet and cold, and we lost very few of those. Meanwhile, spray boats applied the brown waves trying to break up the slicks. And some oil continued to seep up through the channel floor near the sealed well at Platform A. In the midst of all this activity, the giant rig with a capacity of not one, but 60 wells, stood silent. Because the detergent sprays kill marine life, their use was restricted to the immediate area of the spill. And sure, tons of straw were spread on the water to soak up the oil. Alvin Weingang spoke for goo. I think it is useful to know that the disaster was very dramatic in that it covered 800 square miles that polluted that large an area, probably with the greatest single disaster, a pollution disaster that the country had ever known. As a result of this, people from all over the

country, and in fact all over the world rallied to the banner of goo, not only here, but in their own communities, and the watch word of goo, which was to get oil out, became a watch word, a national watch word, to get rid of pollution. So the people of Santa Barbara, probably the cleanest and prettiest resort town on the coast, made oil a dirty word. They had good reason. Practically none of the 700,000 residents had any economic ties with the oil industry. No one had consulted them about putting the oil rigs off shore in the channel. And now, with a tourist season coming up, their beaches were a bettlenum of men and machines. At the peak of our cleanup effort, we had about a thousand men working on those beaches, plus about 200 pieces of equipment. The cleanup job lasted over months, but actually the beaches themselves were back in

use again by the first of June. The total bill on that cleanup operation was about $5 million. To make a messy situation worse, January floods hit nearby Carpentaria. While the oil soaked driftwood was being burned, Union oil president Fred Hartley testified in Congress, Mr. Chairman, I think we have to look at these problems relatively. I'm always tremendously impressed at the publicity that the death of burjory scene versus the loss of people in our country in this day and age. When I think of the folks that gave up their lives and they came down into the ocean off Los Angeles on three weeks ago, and the fact that our society forgets about that within a 24-hour period, I think relative to that, the fact that we have had no loss of life

from this incident is important, and a port. It's true, no human life was lost. In the effort to make the beaches cleaned and pretty again, the bulldozers removed the dirty sand, and the sand organisms between the tidelines, which are food for birds, but no one thought of that at the time, they only saw the obvious, the dirt. Five months later, the oil companies were drilling again on the advice of the president's panel. Dr. McDonnell was a panelman. The U.S. Geological Survey has conducted a program of trying to implement these recommendations. I must say that we're very controversial recommendations, particularly the third one, in which we said, pump, because many people said that this was a blanket go ahead to the development of the channel.

There was anything but that. It was an attempt to repair damages that had been caused through an accident, an attempt to try to reduce the flow of oil at a time when it was coming out at quite a rate. Events would prove the experts right, when union oil temporarily shut down its wells in mid-December. A new leak surged for about 24 hours until the pumping resumes. For the second time that year, the beaches between Ventura and Carpentaria were bathed in scum. And again, birds died. Once opened, the Pandora's box beneath the sea kept threatening to spill on the coasts. On the Channel Islands, two are National Monuments. Anna Kappa, only 13 miles offshore, was surrounded by slicks of coagulating oil for two days.

The oil collected on the surface canopy of the kelp beds, but the seaweed was soon laundered by the heavy surf. Reached oil adhered more stubbornly to rocks. Part of the south and 38 miles offshore, Santa Barbara Island never received a drop of oil. Mostly there was concern for San Miguel, 26 miles from the mainland, the island refuge of some 30,000 resident and migrant seals. For the elephant seals, it was the end of the pumping season. And here at Bennett Point, bull challenged bull across the hauling grounds. Fortunately, the black tide reported by Life Magazine on the 13th of June never reached these white sands.

Nothing disturbed the traditional battles over heralds. For the sea lions, the cycle of birth and breeding had just begun. And all the seals were shedding, not splatched with oil as Life Magazine also reported. Not here at the big rookery, sometime before the 17th of March, an oil slick did come ashore on the other side of the island, in a rocky, sparsely inhabited area. At the point, Bennett herds, literally thousands upon thousands of seals, seemed safe. Seemed safe, but were they? Among those most worried about the long-term effects of the oil was the California Fish and Game Department. In February of 1970, we accompanied Marine Lieutenant Henry Hoover in a team of state divers on their search for damage. The 4th and final expedition, since the big blow-out. Across the channel, Arch Rock, a massive sea sculpture 80 feet high, guards the approach

to Ennecapville. Dr. Charles Turner is in charge, object to check 15 areas here and on neighboring Santa Cruz Island, from the tidal rocks to the subtitle kelp forests beneath the yellow tail. The approaching boat spooks the seals, and the goats. The sea lions take to the water where it's safer, they can get away fast, so they feel comfortable with the men who are swimming too.

Sea lions never had any trouble swimming even in the oil, maybe because they have very little hair to trap the sticky petroleum, but mostly they stayed out of the slicks below the surface. Their physiology allows them to stay under 20 minutes or longer, compared to about a minute for a man without an air tank. Perch and other fish is schooled under the floating oil, as they do under seaweed, to avoid the sharks. These shall be populations of this area appear to be thriving in a no way harmed by the oil. Down through the forest levels, rock fishes, morgonians, the inventory proceeds.

The plankton surveys were conducted by the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries indicated no problem with the plankton, no decrease in numbers, no decrease in speciation. Down here where the hundred foot lengths of giant kelp are fastened, the divers encounter the seals again. From all the findings that I know about, oil probably caused no more harm to the mammals and the natural sieves might have caused. The fact is that oil has been leaking into the channel waters from some two dozen natural siepages for hundreds and thousands of years, and some organisms tolerate the flow. Great colonies of purple sea urchins dig themselves into the rocks in these areas, especially

where the current is strong. There the urchins are clean, and they may even help to dispose of the globules of oil on the bottom. This prickly creature is a cleaner of rocks and seaweed. It scrapes up everything with its sharp teeth, digesting all that is edible, and returning the unwanted gravels to the sea. Some animals have been found to live on crude oil and actually ingested and exist rather nicely with it. The escaping oil is fossil organic matter, pressure cooked under the rocks for millions of years. When released it becomes part of the oceans debris, the stuff on which scavengers live. When a storm-recked jellyfish sinks to its death in the kelp, there is always a crowd waiting, an angry, garaboli fish unsatisfied with a deep sea scallop, a wandering sheep crab, a yellowfin cropper, all will take food dead or alive.

The garaboli is more aggressive than the others. An eventually wins the prize, a few years ago this brilliantly colored rockfish almost became extinct because it couldn't resist biting on a hook. Now it's protected, nothing in the sea is wasted. Even the jellyfish, 95% fluff, the last crumbs drifting like rain on a garden of anemones

with tentacles open, waiting. Coming up on shore at Santa Cruz, the shallow bottom of the cove is disturbed by the sweeping wings of a battery, not menacing, just trying to flush a shellfish dinner from the sand. The channel was not a dead sea, as life magazine had reported. While fish catches were going down at Santa Barbara, they were going up at Oxnard and other ports. The fisheries resources were unharmed. The garaboli, edible to men in starfish, suffered little damage. Barnacles covered with oil a year ago were still alive. Why? Because this type of crude oil is far less toxic than refined oil, gasoline and diesel, for example. Ten years ago, diesel oil from a wrecked tanker killed all the sea urchins and abelonies

in one cove along the coast of Baja, California. They're just beginning to come back. Even though the oil is gone, the ecology of the area has changed radically. This didn't happen in the channel. It's like a problem. It's like cleaner than last time, isn't it, Rick? That's good. Yep. It's right above. It's small, but it'll stand on the bottom with sand, isn't it? Abelonies are off-flade. I'm going to get one of those. From my own standpoint, I don't think that offshore oil drilling is necessarily incompatible

with a properly run environment. Environment and that kind of an activity are completely incompatible. There's no reason in the world where the leases should not be terminated and the oil companies paid off and pick up their rigs and move elsewhere. But one of the great tragedies of Santa Barbara was that the leases were sold without adequately considering the vast resources that the channel has, without taking into account the many interests that people had in the channel. The sole overriding consideration was out of getting more oil, fueling our economy. Oil to feed the lost angelous smoke. The West coast is the biggest producer and user of petroleum in the United States, consuming about 1,900,000 barrels a day, mostly right here. In the whiskey brown smog, brewed by the California sun, rose worse.

Its main ingredients, nitrogen oxides, true automobile exhausts. Los Angeles never had much public transportation. Just freeways and cars, about four million of them spewing out noxious fuels. Emission controls, lead-free gas, all are too little and too late. Now the alternatives aren't pleasant. Is it better to suffer with a smog or spend the money for mass transit? To lose your lifestyle or your life? Yet there is a clear and present danger, like the carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides and jet trails. It can't always be seen. Los Angeles County controls the emission of sulfur dioxide and some factories are converted to low sulfur natural gas, but even this clean burning fossil fuel produces nitrogen oxides. During natural inversions of cold air over warm air, the smog lies in for days. When the air inversion lets up, the pollution disperses into the San Bernardino mountains. Here on the rim forest, at 6,000 feet, the pines are dying.

One by one, their needle's turning yellow. Forty-six thousand acres of pines are nearly gone. Fifty-two thousand acres may be dead in five years. Sixty-one thousand acres are beginning to show symptoms of smog poisoning. A tree, a bird. These are early warning signals. When this survivor of Santa Barbara was released, there were only sixteen western grapes left alive in the child's estate zoo. Oh, in retrospect, you know, you wonder what you've accomplished. But I think, if the whole thing started over again, that we could save a lot more birds. Save them for what? The return to our polluted oceans, the Smithsonian reported eleven other major oil spills in 1969. How many by the end of 1970? Nobiscusia. The arrows spilled one and a half million gallons. Florida. The Deleon Apollons spilled ten thousand gallons.

Sweden, the Polycommanders spilled a hundred thousand metric tons. Louisiana, platform Charlie's spilled seven thousand barrels. Pollution. There's a lot of talk about. It started at Santa Barbara. But the desire to spend big money plainly isn't there. When do we, the President, the Congress, all of us begin to face this clear and present danger? How can we do justice? . .

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