Oil spill off Santa Barbara County coast covers 9 miles, officials say - LA Times No its not another santa barbara or even another bp deepwater horizon, but it is 21,000 gallons that shouldn't have been spilt. Santa Barbara oil spill recalls 1969 spill that changed oil and gas exploration forever - LA Times I didn't know much worse disaster there in 1969 led to creation of the EPA. Discuss.
I understand that EPA was in the 'proposed' stage for several years, but the 1969 event made it hard to hold back. I happened to visit the UCSB campus and its beaches, back in the day. Students kept pails of gasoline outside their apartments for washing their (and their dogs') feet after beach. don't think that one could do that today, it would be rightly viewed as something of a hazard. There is a database on oil spill volumes, somewhere or other. Local conditions are probably just as important as volumes, though. This is one of the offshore fields that was always somewhat 'leaky', even before extraction began. Thus I suppose that microbes there are as 'fit' to eat oil as they are anywhere. Now that modern genetic sequencing exists (did not in 1970) we might expect UCSB or somebody to take a close look at that.
