Word: oils
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...mood of quiet, elegant Santa Barbara as black as the waves that lapped its coastline. The shores and neat marinas were disaster areas. The town was crowded with weary, worried men-Coast Guardsmen, chemists, geologists, conservationists. Along the defiled beaches, convicts from state conservation camps joined hundreds of oil workers in heaving shovelfuls of oil-soaked sand and straw into waiting trucks...
...misty horizon, 51 miles off shore, 100 oil workers struggled desperately on Union Oil Co.'s 150-ft.-high Platform A, beneath which oil was leaking steadily from a fissure in the ocean floor. Barges carrying 15,000 barrels of sealant were towed to the platform, where the crew pumped the plasticlike substance down into a 3,500-ft. hole in the ocean's bottom at a rate of 1,500 barrels an hour. For days, capping efforts had been stymied by high seas, and escaping oil had continued to spread out from the long-legged...
Threatened Haven. Sea life and birds suffered a sad fate. Cormorants and grebes dived into the oily swells for fish, most never to surface alive. All along the mucky shoreline, birds lay dead or dying, unable to raise their oil-soaked feathers. Survivors were rushed to one or three centers nearby to be cleaned in a chemical solution, then carefully wrapped to stave off pneumonia and placed in warm pens to recover. Of the more than 500 birds brought in by week's end, two-thirds had survived. The fouled waters threatened thousands of rookeries on the Santa Barbara...
Almost as worrisome to conservationists were the chemicals dropped from planes and boats to disperse and dissolve the slick. Botanist Michael Neushul of the University of California recalled the 1957 breakup off Baja California of the tanker Tampico, which dumped 59,000 barrels of diesel oil into the Pacific and "utterly impoverished animal life" in the area for five years. In 1967, when the Torrey Canyon-carrying crude-spilled 100,000 tons into the English Channel, 90% of the animal loss was caused by detergents used to clean up the oil. As for Santa Barbara, Neushul figures that such grazing...
Nothing to Fear. In 1967, Santa Barbara officials, fearing that oil rigs offshore would pollute local waters, persuaded the Interior Department to create a two-mile buffer zone beyond the state's demarcation line where no drilling could take place. When oil slicks began to appear along the shoreline last year, Santa Barbara begged then...