Nine Years Since the Refugio Oil Spill

Transfers of ownership are an oil-industry shell game to avoid paying the true costs of cleanup. Often, at the end of an oilfield’s life, the big companies sell their assets to an underfunded entity that then goes bankrupt, abdicating cleanup responsibility.

By Indy Staff May 18, 2024

3 min read

Nine years ago, a badly corroded pipeline near Refugio State Beach ruptured and spilled what experts now believe was more than 450,000 gallons of oil. Much of the oil poured into the ocean, creating the worst spill in the Santa Barbara area since the catastrophic 1969 event that helped spur the modern environmental movement.

I understand the immense power of oil spills. My own life has been profoundly shaped by disasters like the Pipeline 901 spill, and I’m tired of watching marine life suffer.

In 2010, just days after my first time seeing a pod of dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, my joy was suffocated beneath more than 200 million gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. In those dark days, I couldn’t look away as the ocean became a toxic slurry of death. I felt compelled to shift my priorities and abandoned my childhood dream of becoming a marine mammal veterinarian so I could join the fight to stop offshore drilling.