The Santa Barbara Oil Spill – A Predictable Disaster

On Tuesday, May 19, an oil pipeline ruptured along the Gaviota coast – just a 25-minute drive from where I work in Santa Barbara – spilling an estimated 105,000 gallons of crude oil and covering the coastline with an oil slick 9 miles long. As I travelled up the California coast this Memorial Day weekend, the normal vistas of blue ocean and the salty smell of the sea were replaced by an unnatural sheen of oil on water and the acrid odor of spilled petroleum. 

Oil spills like the one in Santa Barbara may be accidental, but they aren’t accidents – they are the inevitable and predictable result of our dependence on fossil fuels. We’ve had enough oil spills to know the massive risks that we are taking by continuing to drill for oil and gas and pipe fossil fuels through our communities and precious ecosystems. The company behind the ruptured pipeline is Plains All American Pipeline, which has been responsible for 16,000 barrels of spilled oil since 2006. This most recent spill came from a pipeline that ruptured on land and sent oil spilling into the ocean around a protected state beach, Refugio State Beach, which harbors unique marine life. Although it’s too early to tell how much wildlife will be impacted, the oil threatens the 19,000 gray whales that migrate past the shores, bird species that forage for food on the beaches, and marine species on the ocean floor where the sun-heated oil will sink. 

This is another stark example of the dangers of onshore and offshore drilling to marine animals and ecosystems. Over and over the oil industry has proven that our communities and our ecosystems are not safe from the hazards of drilling, and the disasters do not always come from the obvious sources. Driving up Highway 101 or walking along Sands Beach near the University of Santa Barbara, I can see the oil rigs offshore – black structures during the day and brightly lit spectacles at night – and worry that there might be a spill (like the spill that occurred off of Santa Barbara’s coast in 1969). This most recent spill, however, did not come from these prominent structures, but from a much-harder-to-notice, underground, onshore pipeline that skirted regulatory oversight by failing to install an automatic shut-off valve and managed to leak enough oil before being manually shut off that more than 20,000 gallons reached the ocean. There are significant risks inherent in oil extraction, transport and combustion, and we can’t anticipate where the next tragedy will happen. This means that our oil dependence is a problem – not only because fossil fuel combustion is contributing to global warming every day – but because, inevitably, this will not be the last time a leak or spill strikes.