ENVIRONMENT: TRAGEDY IN OIL

IT looked like a massive, inflamed abscess bursting with reddish-brown pus. The huge bubble of oil and natural gas boiling up from beneath the surface of Santa Barbara Channel at a rate of almost 1,000 gallons an hour spilled across the blue water for eleven days. It finally coated an area of at least 400 square miles and fouled 40 miles of incomparable beach front with acrid, tarlike slime. TIME Correspondent Robert Anson, flying over the despoiled sea, found the fumes noxious at 1,000 feet.

Anson also found the 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.

On the 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 rig at the rate of three miles per hour, cutting a devastating swath through the water.

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 Islands, haven for the sea elephant, the Guadalupe fur seal (once thought extinct) and the rare sea otter.

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 organisms as limpets and abalones are in the greatest danger. Even as he spoke, oil emulsified by the surf sank to the bottom, killing lobsters, sea urchins, mussels, clams and some fish. Inevitably, plants would prosper at the expense of animals. Said Neushul: "This could lead to a drastic ecological imbalance."

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

Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall for an extension of the buffer, which would have encompassed the area occupied by the Union Oil rig and avoided the present disaster. Udall assured the town officials that the Federal Government would keep a close eye on the drilling. "Always, Interior and oil officials led us to believe we had nothing to fear," says Santa Barbara County Supervisor George Clyde. The Government, of course, profited by the drilling; last year it made $1.6 billion in rentals, royalties and bonus payments from the Santa Barbara concession. The block that included the leaky Union well was good for $61.4 million in bonus revenues to the Federal Government.

Expanding Mass. The management of Union Oil Co. was understandably reticent about divulging fully what went wrong on Platform A, which it managed in consortium with Gulf, Mobil and Texaco. After getting permission to cut some corners from the U.S. Geological Survey, an arm of the Interior Department that has the responsibility of enforcing federal laws governing drilling, Union Oil went ahead and drilled A21. Having burrowed down 3,500 ft. below the ocean floor, the riggers than began to retrieve the pipe in order to replace a drill bit. At a point during the withdrawal, the drilling "mud," which is constantly pumped into the well to maintain pressure, became dangerously inadequate for the job. The well blew. An initial attempt to cap the hole was successful, but that led to a tremendous buildup of pressure. The expanding mass widened a fissure, and the released gas and oil bubbled and boiled through the crack and up 700 ft. to the surface. Essentially, when the fateful fissure occurred, Union was operating below regular federal--and far below California--standards.

While known in Southern California as "the go-go company," Union also has picked up something of a reputation as a polluter. Only two weeks ago, the company was accused of dumping 1,500 barrels of crude into the Santa Ana River after a mud slide broke a pipeline. Twice in 1967, the company was brought up on violations of California fish and game statutes for polluting Los Angeles harbor. Indeed, its competitors complain that Union is giving the industry a bad name. After the disaster, representatives of oil companies operating rigs off Santa Barbara met quietly to decide, as one participant put it, whether "to take the drop from the gallows together." Reluctantly, they agreed to back Union--at least for the time being.

For Richard Nixon, who has had little time to act on the strong recommendations of his environmental task force, the Santa Barbara disaster was a reminder of the ineffective, 15-year-old laws that rule offshore drilling. Nixon promised to put fresh teeth in federal regulations "so that this kind of incident will not occur again." But his Secretary of the Interior did little to reinforce the President's pledge. Nixon had sent Walter Hickel to the disaster area in a presidential jet. At first, Hickel impressed Santa Barbarans by persuading all oil companies in the area to suspend operations. Then, inexplicably, Hickel reversed himself, only to re-reverse his stand two days later and close the ngs down again. Hickel's ambivalence and his defense of Union Oil infuriated conservationists, who noted that the Secretary had close relations with the oil industry while Governor of Alaska. Nor were the citizens of the oil-soaked town reassured. "I have the feeling," said Fred Eissler of the Sierra Club, "that if Hickel walked into Santa Barbara right now, the people would tar and feather him And God knows, we have plenty of both !5

Mother Earth. Much the same reception greeted Union Oil President Fred Hartley when he traveled to Washington last week to appear before the Senate Public Works subcommittee on air and water pollution, Hartley, who is a blunt, short-tempered executive, had dismissed the tragedy as "'Mother Earth letting the oil come out" At the hearings, the Senators were already grumbling that the Interior Department had not bothered to send a representative. Hartley did not help his cause by saying; "I'm amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds '' Most heated were his exchanges with Maine s conservation-minded Edmund Muskie, but it appeared that the Senator would have the last word. The Democrat's Water Quality Improvement bill, which was waylaid during the 90th Congress, was given a much better chance of passage in the wake of the Santa Barbara foul-up. Even the American Petroleum Institute, which had represented the industry in fighting the bill, now gave its blessings. Among other things, the bill would subject ships and installations, such as oil rigs, to fines as high as $5,000 for spillage. Willful violators would be liable for damage up to $15 million. Moreover, rigs would have to meet quality standards of the state or interstate control agency.

By week's end, oil workers had managed to seal the well off Santa Barbara with concrete, making it finally as dead as the multitude of creatures, from sea urchins to seals, that it had doomed. Facing Union was a brace of lawsuits, notably one for $1.3 billion on behalf of all damaged parties, and another by California's attorney general. During eleven days, the well had spouted more than 200 thousand gallons. Drilling will doubtless resume quickly, but it may take years before the ecological balance of Santa Barbara bay is restored.

The ugly mess suggested that the existing legal controls that guide offshore drilling are inadequate, out-of-date and too easily circumvented. The oil industry, of course, is by no means the only or the most consistent contaminator of the environment, but its accidents are seldom small ones. However tragic the circumstances, the case for strong, and strongly enforced, new anti-pollution legislation has never been made more forcefully.

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