By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
You may have seen the misinformed editorial cartoon disseminated by the Tribune syndicate in the wake of the May 19 Santa Barbara oil spill. The people of Santa Barbara – or maybe all of America – are depicted asking: “How could the Santa Barbara oil spill possibly happen?” as an oil slick in the ocean congeals to spell out the reply: “FOREIGN OIL LIFESTYLE.”
No doubt Santa Barbara residents got some grim amusement out of the notion that Platform Hondo has been pumping “foreign oil” out of the Santa Barbara Channel and conveying it to the Las Flores Canyon processing plant and the All-American Pipeline. But the ignorance of editorial cartoonists was fed by reporters, who, in the first days of the spill, failed to clearly answer one of the most basic questions about the story they were reporting: “Where did the oil come from?”
So let’s be clear: Before the oil that wrecked Refugio State Beach fell into the hands of Plains All American L.P. -- rocketing up the charts of the industry’s top ten malefactors as per the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration -- it was brought up from the ocean floor and pumped ashore by an offshore rig. Then a pipeline breached, and the oil went back into the ocean.
The second Santa Barbara oil spill happened for the same reason the first one did: Offshore oil drilling has been permitted off Santa Barbara.
The point was driven home in an “if only” May 25 post by Bill Simpich on Reader Supported News:
“In 1975, the organization Get Oil Out (GOO) convinced 1500 of us to gather in front of the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors. We called for the county to deny the permit for a proposed gas processing facility in Las Flores Canyon…. We had passion, law, and logic on our side. Everything but enough votes. We lost 3 to 2.”
If, back in the day, long before GOO went begging to a hostile board of supervisors, a national marine sanctuary had been designated off Goleta, those drilling platforms would never have gone in. Hence, there would have been no onshore processing facility, and no All-American Pipeline. Because you can’t drill for oil in a national marine sanctuary.
If you have a national marine sanctuary, you have the only protection against offshore drilling that is not subject to political whims – who’s on the board of supervisors, who has the majority in Sacramento or Washington, which entity can spend the most money to pass or defeat a ballot initiative, etc.
But my May 6 post mulling over the peculiar opposition to a national marine sanctuary for the Central Coast is out of date. The peculiar opponents of the nomination for a Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary must now find a way around a ten-square-mile oil slick in order to maintain their opposition. They have to explain why what just happened to Santa Barbara County is something we should risk here.
How many pelicans, lobsters, dolphins, kelp bass and other sea life have perished in the spill and will go on perishing, we will never know. The damage to wildlife and to the ecosystem will go on long after the beaches are re-opened and the cleanup deemed complete.
Likewise, it will only be possible to estimate the size of the hit Santa Barbara’s $1.2 billion tourism economy has taken and will go on taking, and how much the 12,000 people employed by it are going to feel it, in the empty campgrounds, cancelled hotel rooms, vacant restaurant tables, unrented kayaks and sparsely populated shops.
And if sanctuary opponents prevail, someday you, too, San Luis Obispo, can wonder how long it will take our coastal tourism-dependent economy to recover from waves of toxic black goo and from the images flashing across the nation’s TV screens as the name of our county becomes the prefix to the phrase “Oil Spill Disaster” and is burned into the public consciousness.
Without a national marine sanctuary, it can happen here. With a national marine sanctuary, it can’t.
So let me make a suggestion to the several hundred local residents who have signed on in support of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary: Attend the June 23 meeting of the Port San Luis Harbor Commission.
At that meeting, the Commission is scheduled to vote on a resolution to oppose the nomination of our waters as a national marine sanctuary. (Check the website for the agenda and any changes as the date nears.)
Sanctuary supporters will be there to refute the fears, rumors, speculative fiction and tall tales that form the basis of the draft resolution. From out of that swirling fog, one point should stand out with perfect clarity: You gotta fight for your right to sanctuary. (If you want to help out the harbor commissioners by relating some facts to them at that meeting, contact us.)
But hey, that’s weeks from now, so I could be wrong. It was April when the harbor commissioners expressed their determination to draft that resolution and vote on it – pre-spill, in other words. Maybe that was then and this is now. Maybe now sanctuary opponents get it. Maybe they understand the reason beyond all the other reasons why they should not only withdraw their opposition but ask the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to designate the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary with all possible speed.
Maybe now they now what Refugio knows.
But just in case they don't, let's tell them.