Amid a week of horror and heartbreak, outrage and demands for greater accountability, many Californians couldn’t help but question all the other oil platforms that have rusted and churned for decades just a few miles offshore.
Take Platform A, perhaps the most notorious rig of them all: On the morning of Jan. 28, 1969, this looming complex of metal off the Santa Barbara coast had ruptured the seafloor and boiled the sea black. Thousands of birds, drenched in oil, struggled to take flight. Sea otters flailed in the water. The spill became the “environmental shot heard round the world”—galvanizing the nation and forever sealing California’s distaste for offshore drilling.
News article on 11 October 2021 by Rosanna Xia, Susanne Rust and Anita Chabria from phys.org
For further reading, please visit phys.org >> California’s offshore oil rigs are decades old, and industry resists decommissioning them