The Santa Barbara Oil Spill: A Retrospective

Abstract

The year was 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 am on Tuesday morning, January 28, 1969, about five 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 extraction of the pipe was not sufficiently compensated for by the pumping of drilling mud back down the well, which caused a disastrous pressure 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 only succeeded in further increasing the pressure 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.