What does summertime in Southern California mean to you? Vacation, beaches, surfing, and swimming. Our coastline has earned a reputation for incomparable, outdoor recreation, which drives billions of dollars to our state’s economy. Sadly, the summer of 2015 presented something quite different to Southern California residents and visitors alike. This year was marked by a massive onshore oil spill at Refugio Beach in Santa Barbara with tar balls washing up on beaches in Ventura, Los Angeles, and Orange counties.
On May 19, when the Plains All American Pipeline flooded Santa Barbara’s Gaviota Coast with a minimum of 140,000 gallons of heavy crude oil, it closed two state parks and coastal campgrounds for months, shut down over 150 square miles of fishing grounds, killed hundreds of sea birds and marine mammals, and did significant harm to the tourism economy that our coastal communities rely on. This is in addition to ruining the vacation plans of hundreds of families and damaging the clean beach reputation that Southern California enjoys.
This was the largest coastal oil spill in our region since 1969’s great Santa Barbara Oil Spill, an event that has been credited with giving birth to the modern environmental movement. But the Plains All American Oil Spill is hardly an anomaly. Spills of varying sizes happen all the time. What this disaster did offer was a clear reminder that no matter what technology is employed, we cannot eliminate risk from oil development — in fact the only way to avoid accidents is to not drill. And where our precious coastal areas are concerned, it is critical for our health and safety, for our coastal economies and for the beaches and waves we treasure, that we say no to further oil drilling in marine areas. The coastline is just too precious and vulnerable to the inevitable damage from the next spill. A legislative bill being debated in Sacramento, SB 788, would stop any further drilling in coastal areas.