Earth Day celebrations are a time-honored tradition on the Central Coast. In fact, we can trace the origins of Earth Day back to Santa Barbara. The 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill, which deposited hundreds of thousands of gallons of polluting oil into our ocean waters and onto our beaches, killed thousands of marine animals, served as a catalyst for the very first Earth Day. This also inspired the broader American environmental movement. At the time, it was the largest oil spill in American history. Today, it ranks third.
Several decades later, in 2015, our local environment was again devastated by the Refugio Oil Spill when a corroded Plains All American pipeline, Line 901, ruptured and spilled over 140,000 gallons of crude oil along the Gaviota coast. I walked along that beach after the spill and the image of our coast slicked with oil has stayed with me and inspires my work in Congress to this day.
It took over two hours to detect the source of the spill, because pipeline operators turned off the alarm to notify them of a leak, and because the pipeline was not equipped with an automatic shut-off valve. A year after the spill, an inspector general report found that the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) failed to implement dozens of legally-required safety measures for eight years. One of those measures requires pipelines to have an automatic shut-off valve.