November 2010 - Parks & Recreation - 44

The 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill
How Blackened Public Beaches
Sparked the Environmental Movement

n 1969, sticky crude oil that tarred a stretch of beloved California state beaches would become rocket fuel for the launching of
the modern environmental movement. When Union Oil's deepsea rigs six miles off the coast of Southern California suffered a
blowout, a 50-mile-wide expanse of California's coastline was fouled.
It is estimated that over a 10-day period, between 80,000 and
100,000 barrels of crude oil spilled into the Santa Barbara Channel
and onto the shoreline of Santa Barbara County. Local residents, visitors to the scene, and media camera crews had easy access to the
devastated state beaches and county park land-and to the nightmarish images of oil-coated wildlife washed up on those public shores.
President Richard Nixon, who had been in office just two weeks at
the time of the spill, ordered a team of engineers and scientists to Santa Barbara to investigate. Nixon himself took a helicopter tour of the
channel and visited one of the state beaches in the aftermath of the
spill. He was appalled by the blackened shore, the stench of oil, and
the dead wildlife. He commented to reporters, " The Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people. "
What President Nixon and his investigative team witnessed in Santa
Barbara led to a 34,000-acre expansion of the Department of the Interior buffer zone in the channel-and, more importantly, to the creation
of the Environmental Protection Agency. Just as significant, though,
was the mark that 1969 oil spill left upon the psyche of the nation. The
media documented average citizens trying to soak up oil with straw
and steam-clean boulders at Carpinteria State Beach. The rest of the
country watched on the evening news footage of volunteers gathering
convulsing, oil-encrusted birds from Carpinteria and other public
beaches and taking them in their cars to makeshift rescue centers.
The disaster that polluted the state beaches of Santa Barbara
was not solely responsible for igniting the nation's environmental
consciousness. Throughout the decade of the 1960s, the effects of
industrial pollution had come more and more before the public eye.
The dawning sense of environmental responsibility began with Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring and continued with grassroots activism such as the anti-DDT campaign and policy landmarks
like the passage of the Water Quality Act. Santa Barbara, however,
added a new intensity and fervor to the battle against industrial
pollution. The despoiling of those treasures of California's public
coastline represented, in a powerful, visual and thoroughly public
way, the grave ecological threat posed by offshore oil drilling.

42 Parks & Recreation

No v e m b e r 2 0 1 0

www.NRPA .ORG

during the " shoulder season " of October.
Gulf State Park has long enjoyed a close working relationship with the Alabama Gulf Cost Convention and Visitors' Bureau (CVB)-a relationship that has served both state parks
and regional tourism promotion well in the aftermath of the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Guinn commented that the state
parks have always followed the leadership of the CVB in hosting and staffing events-and in the efforts to rebuild tourism in the region, that mutually supportive role has only been
strengthened. The recent festival and concert events on the
beaches are prime examples of that successful cooperation
between the state park and the visitors' bureau.
" I personally believe that we're back to business, " Guinn
says. " Going to take some time, though, to determine that for
a fact. "

Gulfport, Mississippi: Lessons Learned
" How clean is clean? " ponders Bobby Weaver, director
of Harrison County's Sand Beach Authority in the city of
Gulfport, Mississippi.
Although much of the beach has been oil-free for several
weeks, some areas still see tar balls washing up daily. Until
the tar balls stop, which may take up to two years, the public
image of the beach will be difficult to restore. Additionally, the
parameters for acceptable levels of subsurface oil still haven't
been established. Weaver expects to spend the winter season
working with the state on a demonstration project to locate any
subsurface oil, using funds from a grant from BP.
Although the quantity of tar balls has been manageable, he
hopes to get rid of the subsurface oil and get the beach clean
now, so the next beach season will be as oil free as possible.
He also hopes this will help protect birds feeding in nearshore
areas. Some dead birds with oil on them were found on the
beach over the summer, but the cause of their deaths is still
being investigated.
In some ways, recovery from the drastic but short-term effects of hurricanes is easier to anticipate than from this longterm uncertainty.
" With a hurricane, pretty much everything else stops and
all you focus on is the hurricane response and recovery, "
Weaver says. " In this situation, nothing else stopped. You still
had people wanting to do beach events, you still had projects
you had to get done, and then you added all the extra stuff
of dealing with the response and recovery from the oil spill. "
However, Weaver says he has enjoyed good communication
with the BP cleanup crew contractors. Thanks to daily contact,
he is able to have crews dispatched to problem areas and they
have developed a plan to clean the beach in different phases.
" You've got to weigh all the options and just rely on your
instinct and utilize whatever experience you have, " Weaver
says of his preparations for oil washing up. Local knowledge
of the beach's slope and typical tidal range helped him see the

November 2010 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of November 2010 - Parks & Recreation