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The Santa Barbara Oil Spill: A Retrospective

2002; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pcg.2002.0014

1551-3211

Keith Clarke, Jeffrey J. Hemphill,

Oil Spill Detection and Mitigation

The Santa Barbara Oil Spill: A Retrospective K e it h C . C l a r k e a n d J e f f r e y J . H e m p h il l Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara T h e y e a r w a s 1969, a momentous year for the nation and the world. At the movie theater, Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were playing. A new generation converged on Yasgur's farm in New York for Woodstock. From the moon, we heard "Houston ...Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." In the fall, the Amazin' Mets won the World Series, and in Vietnam, the war raged on. Early in that same year, a new attitude toward the environment was born in Santa Barbara, California. At 10:45 a.m. on Tuesday morning, January 28,1969, about 5 miles off the coast from the aptly named small coastal community of Summerland, all hell broke loose. Like most catastrophes, there was not one point of failure but many acting in concert. The problems began on an offshore drilling rig operated by Union Oil called platform Alpha, where pipe was being extracted from a 3,500-foot-deep well. The pressure difference created by the extrac­ tion of the pipe was not sufficiently compensated for by the pumping of drilling mud back down the well, which caused a disastrous pres­ sure increase. As the pressure built up and started to strain the casing on the upper part of the well, an emergency attempt was made to cap it, but this action succeeded only in further increasing the pres­ sure inside the well. The consequence was that, under extreme pressure, a burst of natural gas blew out all of the drilling mud, split the casing, and caused cracks to form in the seafloor surrounding the well. A simple solution to the problem was now impossible; due to the immense pressure involved and the large volume of oil and natural gas being released, a "blowout" occurred and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill was under way (Figure 1). In retrospect, the simplified cause of the blowout was an indus­ trial accident. Yet how the accident precipitated the events that followed was far from simple. Union Oil (now Unocal) had been granted a waiver by the United States Geological Survey that al­ lowed them to use a shorter casing, a reinforcing element of the well 158 APCG YEARBOOK • Volume 64 • 2002 that is supposed to prevent blow­ outs, on the pipe than Federal Stan­ dards prescribed. Even though the w ell itself was capped, the frag­ mentation of the w ellhead pro­ duced a disaster. Oil and natural gas boiled to the ocean surface in the vicinity of the oil days w hile inc r e a s i n g l y desperate attempts were made to contain and stop the spill. The techniques, equipment, and resources necessary to combat an oil spill of this magnitude did not exist at the time. On the 11th day, chemical mud was successfully used to seal the cracks in the seafloor , but only after approximately 3 million gallons of oil escaped. The wind, ocean currents, tides, and waves dispersed the spilled oil into the pristine and biologically diverse waters of the Santa Bar­ bara channel and coated the shoreline. Platform Alpha is one of several drilling rigs that extract oil from an oil-rich geologic structure called the Venture Avenue Anticline that traverses the Santa Barbara Channel. There are vast quantities of oil beneath the ocean floor in the Santa Barbara Channel; in fact, it was in this area where the world's first offshore drilling took place from a pier at the turn of the 20th century. Today, as one drives from Ventura to Santa Barbara along California Highway 101, along the roadside is a small seaside town called La Conchita (known for a famous landslide that occurred in 1995). Here it is possible to look out and see a row of active drilling platforms. This linear arrange­ ment reflects the trajectory of the Ventura Avenue Anticline, which Figure 1. Platform A...