A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [28]
January 28, 1969. A blowout at a drilling rig six miles off Santa Barbara, California, sends 4 million gallons of crude oil into the Santa Barbara Channel, where it fouls beaches in the Channel Islands and exclusive parts of the mainland coast. Residents and the country are horrified by the sight of thousands of dying seabirds, elephant seals, sea lions, and other wildlife. The disaster creates significant awareness of the vulnerability of nature, as well as an impetus for the major environmental legislation that followed in the 1970s. It remains the third-largest U.S. marine spill.
September 1969. A tugboat towing the oil barge Florida from Rhode Island to a power plant on the Cape Cod Canal snaps its towline. The barge runs aground on boulders, spilling 180,000 gallons at West Falmouth and killing lobsters, scallops, clams, crabs, marine worms, and fish such as tomcod and scup. Though relatively small compared to some other spills, this is among the best studied. Four decades later, oil still forms a visible layer four inches below the marsh surface. Burrowing fiddler crabs still try to avoid the oil, and react slowly to startling motions such as a predator might make.
December 15, 1976. The Argo Merchant, which has been involved in more than a dozen incidents, including a collision and two groundings, runs aground again, this time off Nantucket, Massachusetts, and sinks. Its 7.7 million gallons of spilled oil cause a slick 100 miles long, 50 miles wide. The ship’s résumé earns it a place in Stephen Pile’s 1979 Book of Heroic Failures, “written in celebration of human inadequacy in all its forms.”
March 1978. Oil again spoils the shores of Brittany, after the Amoco Cadiz loses its steering, snaps the towing cables of a rescue tug, and spills 69 million gallons of Iranian crude, which besmirches 400 miles of the French coast and destroys thousands of acres of oyster beds and thousands of fish, shellfish, and seabirds. Fish starve as their prey die, and fish populations remain depressed for two years. Where French authorities scrape oiled marshes, most never come back. Where they leave marshes alone, the ecosystems recover.
June 3, 1979. Ixtoc I, a Mexican drilling rig in about 160 feet of water, blows out and blows up, igniting an explosion and a fireball. The rig sinks. By the time two parallel relief wells plug it with 3,000 sacks of cement, it has hurled 140 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the world’s largest petroleum accident up until that time. Oil eventually decimates mollusks and intertidal vertebrates along the Texas coast. An American graduate student and a Mexican biologist airlift 10,000 endangered sea turtle hatchlings to an oil-free part of the Gulf.
Late 1970s. President Jimmy Carter envisions a future array of energy sources and represents this vision with solar panels on the White House roof. After Carter’s one-term presidency, Ronald Reagan has the solar panels dismantled and junked. By the end of 1985, when Reagan’s administration and Congress have allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era has faded. Solar water heating has gone from a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight; thousands of sun-minded businesses have gone bankrupt. “It died. It’s dead,” says one solar-energy businessman of the time. “First the money dried up, then the spirit dried up.”
1988. Occidental Petroleum’s North Sea production platform Piper Alpha produces about a tenth of all North Sea oil and gas. When it explodes on July 6, it kills 167 men.
March 1989. The 987-foot supertanker Exxon Valdez has just been loaded with 50 million gallons of crude oil piped across the vastness of Alaska from the North Slope to a terminal near the tiny village of Valdez, on Prince William Sound. After altering course to avoid ice, the crew fails to get the ship to respond to efforts to resume course. Bligh Reef opens the