Over the course of 10 infamous days in January 1969, more than 80,000 barrels of crude oil gushed into the Santa Barbara Channel. The pollution fouled beaches from Goleta to Ventura and decimated marine life, killing animals as large as dolphins and sea lions.
The spill and other events that year like the Cuyahoga River catching on fire (again) triggered a wave of public outrage that rolled all the way to Washington, D.C., where it swept a number of pioneering environmental laws through Congress — laws that became the foundation of the environmental movement. California, and Santa Barbara in particular, has been at the leading edge of this movement from the beginning.
The state’s next governor will take office exactly 50 years to the month after the infamous 1969 oil spill. While we can celebrate a long list of conservation victories achieved since then and take pride in our well-organized (and ongoing) defense of California’s coastal waters from offshore drilling, our next governor will inherit a massive water pollution problem that has gone unaddressed for too long.