The Santa Barbara Oil Spill Exposes the Costs of Offshore Drilling (1970)

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.