ARTICLE
Like so many of us who cherish our coastal lifestyle, the scenes in Southern California in Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and down to Dana Point are an alarming reminder how fragile our coastal waters are, and how vulnerable to catastrophe. The oil spill spells disaster for those long stretches of southern California beaches, the sea critters and birds. According to the latest reports, the oil continued to move south after fouling beaches and wetlands in Huntington Beach on Sunday. While much of it remained off the coast, oil did wash up in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and Dana Point, prompting officials to close the harbor and Baby Beach. State Park officials closed Bolsa Chica State Beach on Tuesday after officials observed oil in that area, which is slightly north of the Huntington City beaches. The spill was initially estimated at about 126,000 gallons of crude, but late Monday, state and federal officials said that number could be closer to 144,000 gallons. This scene beckons back to my UC Santa Barbara college days where I would run on the beach and return to my apartment with clogs of oil on my running shoes. I was attending UCSB in the mid-70s several years after the 1969 oil spill prompted a rallying cry for the offshore moratorium to keep oil rigs off our California coast. During the mid-1980s, we continually pressed our California congressional delegation, our US Senators and Governors in Sacramento to say NO to offshore oil exploration in California. Local groups such as Save Our Shores, led by my dear friend, Dan Haifley and other environmental stewards, worked hand-in-hand with our local elected leaders, the business and community stakeholders to convince the George H. Bush administration to create the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS). That milestone achievement was the culmination of years of community activists’ lobbying efforts, which finally came to fruition in 1992. I was a congressional staffer for one of our local Congressmen during that time, working behind the scenes to ensure that Monterey Bay was protected from as far south and far north as possible. The boundaries of the MBNMS were stretched from Cambria in the south to Half Moon Bay in the north, and has since expanded even further north to the Farallon Islands. Today, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (a Chamber member) continues to work to protect the Monterey Bay through philanthropic fundraising and activities to reduce plastic pollution into the Bay. Regrettably, the MBNMS hasn't stopped the oil rig disasters over the last four decades along our coastal waters in Southern California. Even with state laws enacted in the 1990s and as recently as 2018 to curb any effort to establish oil infrastructure facilities in California coastal waters or on shore, the oil rigs built in the 1970s, 80s, and 1980s in federal waters continue to exploit our coastline. Is it time that we put a FINAL STOP SIGN on the California coastline to remove the decades-old oil rigs? The signals are again in place via national legislation to do just that at a time where California is leading the way in addressing climate change. Legislation by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to ban new federal oil leases off the entire West Coast could be wrapped into the mammoth budget bill Democrats are fighting over on Capitol Hill. Some will point out that we are not at a place where we can eliminate fossil fuels from our national energy diet. But that day is coming despite the petroleum industry using its heavy lobbying hand to share story after story of the better paying blue collar jobs in the industry that are a direct result of our national energy policy. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Gavin Newsom said at a press conference at Bolsa Chica State Beach, “It’s time once and for all to disabuse ourselves that this has to be part of our future.” He continued, “This is part of our past and we can moralize and talk about the good old days, we can talk about how important these rigs had been to the prosperity of this country in the middle class, but at the end of the day this is about the stale air of normalcy versus the fresh air of progress.” Will his plea be heard beyond the oily Southern California beaches? His alarm cry will need a larger unified voice from California and other western coastal states to blunt the arguments from the petroleum industry. The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) has been a strong influencer of energy policy in the Western United States. According to their website, “WSPA is dedicated to ensuring that Americans continue to have reliable access to petroleum and petroleum products through policies that are socially, economically and environmentally responsible. We believe the best way to achieve this goal is through a better understanding of the relevant issues by government leaders, the media and the general public.” The lines of argument have been decades in the making; however, there is no denying the oil industry is facing challenges to be relevant in an ever-changing energy market. Ironically, immediately after the oil spill happened, WSPA issued the following statement: https://www.wspa.org/resource/every-spill-is-a-tragedy-our-statement-on-the-platform-elly-incident/ According to the latest report from the Los Angeles Times, commercial divers who were hired to examine the suspected source of the leak found an area where the 17.7-mile pipeline had been displaced by about 105 feet; there was a 13-inch split along the length of the pipe. It is not clear what caused the damage to the pipeline, which allowed tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil to spill into the waters off Orange County. Investigators have said they are looking into whether a ship’s anchor had caused the pipe breach, but officials did not provide more information about that probe on Tuesday. Divers and remote vehicle footage has confirmed the tear is no longer leaking, officials said. Rebecca Ore, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Los Angeles-Long Beach, said that after receiving information Friday night about a sheen on the water, the Coast Guard launched an “initial investigation” that involved calling the reporting party for more information. But that call was “inconclusive” in determining whether the sheen was an oil spill. Ore said the Coast Guard, state and local authorities sent up aircraft at first light Saturday to assess the situation. As we move from what happened, who is to blame, question the timing of the oil company’s alert to federal agencies about the spill, to the full investigation and the finger pointing that follows an environmental disaster, it will be months before we fully understand the damage assessment, the fines, penalties and lawsuits that are certain to follow. As reported again in the Orange County Register, the LA Times and other news outlets, government regulators have long failed to effectively oversee energy companies that rely on pipelines to transport large volumes of oil from offshore rigs, according to experts, environmental advocates and even reports by a federal watchdog agency. Federal overseers are short-staffed and have failed to update regulations that are in some cases decades old, falling behind technological advances in the industry, environmentalists and industry experts said. Following the devastating Refugio oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast in 2015, Miyoko Sakashita of the Center for Biological Diversity co-signed a letter from the organization petitioning the two federal agencies responsible for overseeing underwater pipelines to adopt an aggressive inspection program and stop relying on oil companies to conduct their own inspections. But the demand went nowhere. “The system is flawed,” she said Tuesday, “and there is inadequate oversight of these platforms.” Another comment came from Maggie Hall, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Center, a nonprofit environmental law firm that was created in response to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. She said there’s a long history of insufficient transparency and federal oversight when it comes to offshore operations in California: “There is a disconnect between the responsible agencies’ duties to make sure these things are safely happening — and the reality.” I believe we have reached a point where the past spills in California, Texas and the Gulf of Mexico require a greater sense of urgency.
Like so many of us who cherish our coastal lifestyle, the scenes in Southern California in Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and down to Dana Point are an alarming reminder how fragile our coastal waters are, and how vulnerable to catastrophe. The oil spill spells disaster for those long stretches of southern California beaches, the sea critters and birds. According to the latest reports, the oil continued to move south after fouling beaches and wetlands in Huntington Beach on Sunday. While much of it remained off the coast, oil did wash up in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and Dana Point, prompting officials to close the harbor and Baby Beach. State Park officials closed Bolsa Chica State Beach on Tuesday after officials observed oil in that area, which is slightly north of the Huntington City beaches. The spill was initially estimated at about 126,000 gallons of crude, but late Monday, state and federal officials said that number could be closer to 144,000 gallons.
This scene beckons back to my UC Santa Barbara college days where I would run on the beach and return to my apartment with clogs of oil on my running shoes. I was attending UCSB in the mid-70s several years after the 1969 oil spill prompted a rallying cry for the offshore moratorium to keep oil rigs off our California coast.
During the mid-1980s, we continually pressed our California congressional delegation, our US Senators and Governors in Sacramento to say NO to offshore oil exploration in California. Local groups such as Save Our Shores, led by my dear friend, Dan Haifley and other environmental stewards, worked hand-in-hand with our local elected leaders, the business and community stakeholders to convince the George H. Bush administration to create the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS). That milestone achievement was the culmination of years of community activists’ lobbying efforts, which finally came to fruition in 1992. I was a congressional staffer for one of our local Congressmen during that time, working behind the scenes to ensure that Monterey Bay was protected from as far south and far north as possible. The boundaries of the MBNMS were stretched from Cambria in the south to Half Moon Bay in the north, and has since expanded even further north to the Farallon Islands.
Today, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (a Chamber member) continues to work to protect the Monterey Bay through philanthropic fundraising and activities to reduce plastic pollution into the Bay.
Regrettably, the MBNMS hasn't stopped the oil rig disasters over the last four decades along our coastal waters in Southern California. Even with state laws enacted in the 1990s and as recently as 2018 to curb any effort to establish oil infrastructure facilities in California coastal waters or on shore, the oil rigs built in the 1970s, 80s, and 1980s in federal waters continue to exploit our coastline.
Is it time that we put a FINAL STOP SIGN on the California coastline to remove the decades-old oil rigs? The signals are again in place via national legislation to do just that at a time where California is leading the way in addressing climate change. Legislation by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to ban new federal oil leases off the entire West Coast could be wrapped into the mammoth budget bill Democrats are fighting over on Capitol Hill.
Some will point out that we are not at a place where we can eliminate fossil fuels from our national energy diet. But that day is coming despite the petroleum industry using its heavy lobbying hand to share story after story of the better paying blue collar jobs in the industry that are a direct result of our national energy policy.
On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Gavin Newsom said at a press conference at Bolsa Chica State Beach, “It’s time once and for all to disabuse ourselves that this has to be part of our future.” He continued, “This is part of our past and we can moralize and talk about the good old days, we can talk about how important these rigs had been to the prosperity of this country in the middle class, but at the end of the day this is about the stale air of normalcy versus the fresh air of progress.”
Will his plea be heard beyond the oily Southern California beaches? His alarm cry will need a larger unified voice from California and other western coastal states to blunt the arguments from the petroleum industry. The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) has been a strong influencer of energy policy in the Western United States. According to their website, “WSPA is dedicated to ensuring that Americans continue to have reliable access to petroleum and petroleum products through policies that are socially, economically and environmentally responsible. We believe the best way to achieve this goal is through a better understanding of the relevant issues by government leaders, the media and the general public.”
The lines of argument have been decades in the making; however, there is no denying the oil industry is facing challenges to be relevant in an ever-changing energy market. Ironically, immediately after the oil spill happened, WSPA issued the following statement: https://www.wspa.org/resource/every-spill-is-a-tragedy-our-statement-on-the-platform-elly-incident/
According to the latest report from the Los Angeles Times, commercial divers who were hired to examine the suspected source of the leak found an area where the 17.7-mile pipeline had been displaced by about 105 feet; there was a 13-inch split along the length of the pipe. It is not clear what caused the damage to the pipeline, which allowed tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil to spill into the waters off Orange County. Investigators have said they are looking into whether a ship’s anchor had caused the pipe breach, but officials did not provide more information about that probe on Tuesday. Divers and remote vehicle footage has confirmed the tear is no longer leaking, officials said. Rebecca Ore, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Los Angeles-Long Beach, said that after receiving information Friday night about a sheen on the water, the Coast Guard launched an “initial investigation” that involved calling the reporting party for more information. But that call was “inconclusive” in determining whether the sheen was an oil spill. Ore said the Coast Guard, state and local authorities sent up aircraft at first light Saturday to assess the situation.
As we move from what happened, who is to blame, question the timing of the oil company’s alert to federal agencies about the spill, to the full investigation and the finger pointing that follows an environmental disaster, it will be months before we fully understand the damage assessment, the fines, penalties and lawsuits that are certain to follow. As reported again in the Orange County Register, the LA Times and other news outlets, government regulators have long failed to effectively oversee energy companies that rely on pipelines to transport large volumes of oil from offshore rigs, according to experts, environmental advocates and even reports by a federal watchdog agency.
Federal overseers are short-staffed and have failed to update regulations that are in some cases decades old, falling behind technological advances in the industry, environmentalists and industry experts said. Following the devastating Refugio oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast in 2015, Miyoko Sakashita of the Center for Biological Diversity co-signed a letter from the organization petitioning the two federal agencies responsible for overseeing underwater pipelines to adopt an aggressive inspection program and stop relying on oil companies to conduct their own inspections. But the demand went nowhere. “The system is flawed,” she said Tuesday, “and there is inadequate oversight of these platforms.”
Another comment came from Maggie Hall, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Center, a nonprofit environmental law firm that was created in response to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. She said there’s a long history of insufficient transparency and federal oversight when it comes to offshore operations in California: “There is a disconnect between the responsible agencies’ duties to make sure these things are safely happening — and the reality.”
I believe we have reached a point where the past spills in California, Texas and the Gulf of Mexico require a greater sense of urgency.