Fifty years after the Jan. 28, 1969 oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel, the region is on the verge of another upheaval – the wholesale removal of aging oil infrastructure.
Seven platforms out of 19 in the Channel have shut down operations and will likely be removed, starting in the 2020s, together with their piers, pipelines and onshore processing plants in Carpinteria, Goleta and Gaviota.
The oil companies themselves will bear most of the cost, billions of dollars overall. At the same time, the state Legislature has been forced to budget tens of millions because former owners have disappeared into history or declared bankruptcy.