My father successfully represented the local fisherman in a lawsuit against the oil companies - one of his proudest "wins" in a long career serving the people of Santa Barbara. Thanks for putting this together! I was able to share it with his grandchildren and recount his small part in the story.
And i bet NO ONE was ever held accountable from the corporation and politicians .. but if i poured a quart of oil into the sea i would be arrested and charged for environmental terrorism...
So basically they were like "Hey you guys, can we ignore that important safety stuff pretty please? What could possibly go wrong?" and then they found out what exactly can possibly go wrong
So the US gov completely ignored the protests of people who actually live in the area in favor of making money...then they let safety standards be ignored ( in favor of money ) and then when things inevitably go wrong...a fine that's not even really a slap on the wrist gets levied and things carry on. I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
I helped clean up the beaches and sea life from these spills in Ventura when I was a kid.. sad,messy and toxic! Gotta love dish detergent!! Worked like a charm!
When I was in high school there was a tanker collision in San Francisco bay that made a pretty big mess. The oil company even hired us older kids to shovel oil off the beaches. January 1971...that was the beginning of requiring tankers and chemical carriers to have double hulls, or at least they talked about it....
It is a good thing. Sadly it often takes major tragedy to get Government to increase their requirements. That being said often their requirements that they add actually do nothing. But it seems like this was likely a good idea. Same thing as seat belts. Most car companies wouldn't put them in because it cost them $12 more. They would even go on to lie to everyone, saying that they would jerk you around more if you were in an accident. Volvo I know, went and figured it out and got the 3-point seat belt almost all seat belts are today and made the patent public for everyone to use of no charge. After enough cases and politicians talking about suing them, they started doing it and put them into every car. Now you bring up Big Pharma and shots.... and people can't understand that the same thing is happening here. They are harming us, and most people believe their propaganda... We need double-blind placebo testing for every single one and verify it 1, 3, 5, 10 years later. Hopefully RFK will help us with this.
@@redactedrider760638 million$ in cost is already adjusted, it was 4.5 mil. at the time. Also from napkin math, 4.2 million gallons of oil is something like 100000 barrels, so with modern prices oil itself would cost about 8 million.
So thought provoking on so many fronts: - the tragic toll on wildlife, environment and local economy, - the failure of regulatory oversight, and how those regulations are designed, - and not least, the technical and engineering aspects of predicting overpressure, then preventing, and ultimately containing, the blowout... We should be able to learn so much, yet the lessons never seem to stick.
@@taocffej sounds like something I'd be interested to know about. Is it an event or a feature, and which part of the world is it from/in? Guess I'll go google it... The US is one part of the world I've never really worked in, so my knowledge of history there is even more sparse than my regional geology knowledge of those parts.
@ It is in the area that this video is about, the oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel between Santa Barbara, California and the Northen Channel Islands offshore. The seep is directly off the beach adjacent to UCSB, University of California, Santa Barbara. They have a well known marine studies department, and having the Coal Oil Point Seep literally in their backyard, it is considered the most extensively researched marine petroleum seep in the world.
I worked at Santa's Village Standard station in 1968 and used to work ALL THE TIME. One night I got off and decided to drive as far south as I could and turn around at the middle of the night to come back. I made it to Santa Barbara on caffeine pills and loud music. I got off the road and went for a walk on the beach there and help me stay awake. I took my shoes off and felt just below the sand sitting on top was oil. It got all over the bottom of my feet. I had to prove I had made it this far from Santa Cruz so I saw a Santa Barbara City constuction sign with a flashing light on it and threw it in my trunk. It was great night. Thanks fort reminding me about it.
The subtlety with which you describe the environmental impact on both land and sea was masterful. You just stated the numbers, which speak bleakly for themselves. Top notch, as always.
My cousin and I were working on his cross country pilots license from Modesto - Paso Robles- Burbank. We flew over it I was 14 years old. We were overwhelmed by the sight.
Growing up in Santa Barbara, I was always told the tar on the beach was from natural seeps and was used by the Chumash to waterproof their boats before the Spanish settlers arrived. I was also told that the drilling platforms were a necessary evil that reduced the pressure feeding the seeps.
Later technology to counter this is a BOP (Blowout protection valve) that closes the drill line and vents it carefully, instead of uncontrolled blowout. Pressure when hitting a pocket of gas/oil can be tremendous.
Have you done a video about the first drill platform accident? I just keep thinking about how we even figured out how to clean up the ocean, what we tried first, how they made the first oil platform and why it failed, everything! Even finding marine deposits of oil, and building platforms feels like it should be impossible let alone cleaning up after it.
Oh, them. An earthquake channel community I follow often calls them USBS. They seem to continually downgrade recorded earthquakes and don't acknowledge the obvious link between EQs and fracking fields.
I worked on Platform C as a Welders Assistant/ Fire Watch in the early 90s. My boss "MacGyver", was a contractor, and was basically on his third rebuild of all the splashworks, and everything else that rusts away. The Oil is Sandy and thick, causing scour in the 48" lines and sometimes they burn a hole and we have to put a HUGE patch cover over it (yea, its easy AND fast) NOT! ...strap it down, but what a mess! Was a fun job.
I remember this: I was around 10 or 11 growing up in Vinetura, California, in 1969. I can remember the spil and the storm like it happened yesterday crazy to see this and think it was like 56 years ago
Drilling is a seemingly simple thing at first. We had 3 natural gas wells on our property in western New York on the medina formation. The shut in pressure on those wells (not flowing, just dead headed) was 900 psi. The gas used in your stove is 3.5" water column. That's about half what it takes to suck soda up a straw. The average water heater is 30,000BTU, natural gas is about 1000 BTU per cubic foot, so 30 cubic feet per hour of run time. Each of those wells produced 20,000 cubic feet per day on average. To say they could be dangerous was an understatement.
I was in Grade 6 at Washington School. We could see clouds of cement being dumped over the side down at the platform. Even at that age, I knew it would never create a cap by the time any of it hit the bottom - if it hit the bottom at all.
I lived in Santa Barbara for years, grew up on the central coast, been looking at those ugly oil rigs my whole life. Had no idea the 3rd worst oil spill in US history happened here.
I remember when it made it to San Diego. It was in large lumps that got washed ashore and then a little sand washed over it. Even if the beach looked clean at first glance, you would end up with tar on the bottom of your feet after a walk.
I live in orange county, half way between the leak and San Diego. You can still find clumps of oil tar after storms and on hot days sone beaches still smell like crude.
That's from hundreds of natural seeps, with the largest being at the Coal Oil Point Seep Field. California Longshore current travels from north to south, so the petroleum will travel in that direction. It's why one will almost always see an iridescent sheen on So Cal waters, especially at Goleta, Carpenteria, Ventura, and further south. Just for Coal Oil Point, it's estimated at 100 to 150 barrels of oil per day. I think La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles is coming from the same formation. 500,000 years of seeping.
I grew up in Santa Barbara. There are big, huge rocks made of dried-up oil on the beach. They are not from the spill, but rather from past events caused by oil that naturally leaks from the ground. That place if just full of oil and earthquakes can cause releases/leaks. There is evidence that past earthquakes have caused spills of their own. It is kind of a freaky place to live. Fires, floods, mudslides, earthquakes. I got out of there and moved to the Midwest. It is cheaper, and I can deal with tornadoes and blizzards better than all those other disasters. Plus, the people are so much nicer out here. Much friendlier.
@@aredditor4272 nice to see someone else that knows about the seeps. a few years ago I read the seeps are slowing down because of the offshore drilling.
Exxon biggest tax payer in the city and county . And we pay highest gas prices in all of the USA . This is one sided , it’s time to get these jobs back and people back to work !!! 2025!!
I'm too young, born in 1965 to actually remember that incident but I was raised about a mile from.the beach South of Santa Barbara in Los Angeles next to LAX airport. My neighborhood is on the Northside of LAX and the airport is actually on the property of my neighborhood called Westchester /Playa Del Rey. The Southside of LAX is El Segundo which is the home of the second Chevron refinery built in California in the early 1900s creating the company town of El Segundo which is Spanish for The Second. The refinery has oil tankers that drop anchor about a quarter mile off the beach near Dockweiler State Beach and El Porto , there is an Edison power plant also on the beach at that location. When the tankers drop anchor they have underwater pipe connections that they couple to and crude oil gets pumped through underwater pipeline to the refinery and sometimes refined gasoline or other products are pumped to the tankers for delivery elsewhere. Growing up surfing and sailing and fishing and snorkeling I spent a lot of time in the water of the Santa Monica Bay. In the location of El Porto (45th St) is a great surfspot during good swells and during the 1970s and 1980s when you were in the water at that location we would constantly get thick black tar on our surfboards our shorts our feet and hands, it smelled very strong of gas in the water at times and the only way to get that tar off of you was paint thinner or gasoline. If it got on your surf trunks it was not likely to get out the stain completely. Many years and many articles of clothing and sandals and beach towels ruined by the leaking crude oil. It's still that way today. The connection and disconnection of the underwater pipeline spills crude every time and they do that a couple times every week.
The port and mission originally shipped cow hides. Before the Panama Canal the ships sailed around South America from Boston to pick up ship loads of dried cow hides for the east coast leather industry in Boston and New York.
@@foo219Especially when the boss puts deregulators in charge of depts that should be regulating. You can expect a lot more of these type of events over the next four years.
@@markc17knowing how Harris handled the southern border one should be thankful for the change in government.. it’s frightening to think of how many incompetent people are now overseeing this industry
What do they say, safety regulations are written in blood? In an oligarchy regulators are captured and obey the oligarchs that don't care about the blood of proletarians. Thank you, excellent as always.
Another brilliant video. No sensation, just facts. I've said this before yet I cannot work out why you don't have at least a million subs. When you look at the channels that have multi-million subs and put out garbage I have to wonder about the mental capacity of those subscribers. On another note was this disaster ever investigated? Did money change hands? Some people should have ended up jail.
Since the Supreme Court has given corporate entities the same rights as a human, the Oil company should be jailed yet....walks away with barely a slap on the pinky.
Prior to the Exxon Valdez incident, I sailed on an Exxon oil tanker into Valdez, Alaska. They were the most safety conscious company with which I sailed.
I loved the black and white picture of the sea shore when they were discussing the 1870s era. It was a picture of a Ford 150 extended cab pickup truck. Damn I wish I had purchased Ford stock a long time ago!!
Your content is great, but the AI you use is really distracting and hurts the credibility of the material. Good facts paired with fake photos is like eating prime rib with ketchup
@@lostpony4885 0:54 Pretty sure that is VW Amarock in black and white footage... Even if i'm mistaken on the model and that is legit photo, there is clear cases of AI produced images and tons of stock well as mixing footage from different decades that make it hard to follow on hows the tech and culture at the time of the incident. Like with sub failure video from 80's, talks about gps positioning ship and shows different ship that was launched with in couple years. Also on video about the adventure ship burning and how there was no escape routes from the engine room, while shows photo of ship with its rear deck hatches open into engine room... I get there is limited amount of footage, but maybe instead pick the photos you have, run them trough AI to create 3D model and use that instead or mark the ones that are not the target ship as examples.
Grew up in L.A. as a kid in late 60's early 70's and when I went to the beach my feet got covered in tar..old timers said it was always that way because of oil seeping up from the ground out at sea. After they started drilling for the oil beach sand cleaned up...
i really dig your channel. i look forward to each weeks videos. i know there is a pronunciation differential between our 2 cultures, and i don't mean to be a grammar demon. but Lyndon Johnson's first name in america is pronounced 'Lind-un'. when you say it at normal speed it sounds like 'Lind-in". thanks for the videos. most older people will know who you're talking about if you simply say LBJ.
He's really quite good at receiving pronunciation feedback; I noticed in this video UNOCAL got the standard pronunciation, where it had his intuitive pronunciation in earlier videos. And agree entirely - these are always high quality, succinct videos
Not that high, we pump much higher pressure than that on a regular basis in the oilfield today. Most of the lines are rated for 10,000 psi, 15,000 burst.
As the old saying goes "Incidents don't happen in a vacuum, they are the culmination of multiple bad decisions". At multiple points a single person could have stopped the chain, including the Gov whose job it was, and instead they subverted their own regulations to prevent this!!!!!! IMO the oil company should also have lost their lease rights (in addition to fine and cleanup costs), and the geological survey should have lost the ability to allow exceptions.
That would leave the industry at the whim of crooked government. The "Deep Horizon" disaster was approved of by myriad regulators. Violations were OK'd and even encouraged by various regulators, not just one guy. Then when the well blew out, the regulators cited the offences they had approved earlier. Do not expect government agents to be truthful.
So they saved a few thousand dollars in doing less prep work for the drill site, and potentially would have sped up the production date by a couple weeks. Some of those thousands "saved" would still have been spent, but this time on campaign donations and/or kickbacks to the politicians who got the approvals pushed through. All the damage to the coast, wildlife, and local business, as well as the effects on the locals lives, just to squeak out what?... tens, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars vs. doing it the right way? It's a perfect story of corporate greed bulldozing everything around for a bit more profit into the hands of a tiny group of people who already have more money than they will ever need.
working for exxon syu (san ynez unit)i decommissioned the OS&T(oil storage&treatment) vessel hondo platform , set harmony&heritage jackets.ultimately brought LFC online supporting all three.
Your seem like a decent chap, one who’s educated in our planet’s majority seascape environment,I’m a native of Liverpool myself and just a few years older, so I’m just curious as to what your thoughts are regarding the sad raft of petroleum disasters that have blighted our oceans and seas from San Francisco to the Caspian Sea and whilst I am impressed by your work here I am compelled to ask what you yourself feel regarding the seemingly endless deaths of our fellow man and how you envisage the future, ideally or abstract. Much respect Sir, Dave. 📚🇬🇧☘️
Hey Dave I think I’m a pragmatist. I’m not a fan of big oil. I think that often decisions are made in the name of profit with little thought to the consequences. That’s true of almost any large corporation run by committee. But chemicals can have such a huge impact on the environment and people. On the other hand I drive a petrol car, I find the engineering incredible and I have a huge amount of respect for the people who work in oil, often putting their lives at risk to keep the economy turning. We would not be as advanced as we are without it. I think in the future, we will all probably need to make conscious decisions about our use of energy. Oil is a short term decision. It’s quick and easy. To change our behaviour we need to make decisions today that affect our future but they’re not as easy as oil. A bit like exercise. It sucks to do but we know it’s good for us. In reality I think we need to use up all the oil so we run out of options and have to adopt new technology. How long that takes, I don’t know. For now we rely on it.
@ my friend I am grateful for you taking the time to reply here and as someone who was born and raised on the banks of the river Mersey and the culture was cammell lairds shipyard and a city apart from the rest of England buoyed up by the Eireann diaspora and the fantastic mix of global people including the oldest Chinese community in Europe you can hopefully see the outlook we had rather than the inwards looking perspective that the majority of Britain has held onto over the years and after watching many of your uploads now I was compelled to ask you for a few of your ideas and your thoughts on a little bit more than what you offer us all in your wonderful work and well crafted posts and I’m not being nosey but I assume that you’re a native antipodean and that you seem to be a chap who would be quite inquisitive regarding your family history as indeed I am and so I guess I’m just trying to explain my curiosity and reasoning for being inquisitive. We lost our grandfather in #WW2 aboard the HMS Celendine in 1943 and our matriarchal grandfather served in the RAF and once again I am most grateful for your time responding to me and your channel is pretty special and I hope you continue posting on it for a long time to come. Best wishes from the city of Liverpool and keep shining your light brightly Sir. ⚽️🇬🇧☘️🙏📚🏴
It's a good thing we as a society are so reactionary or we might need regulations to control this kind of malpractice. Oh, right, we do have them but so many seem to ignore them or have them removed for profit. Profit. Thanks, mate. Take care, fair winds
I remember in the back in the 90s me and my family went to the Santa Barbara beach and I got a glob of crude oil that had washed up on the beach stuck to my foot, it took several days to get it all off.
Use vegetable oil next time. You won't walk a So Cal beach very far without getting petroleum on your feet. There's hundreds of natural seeps on and offshore.
Yeah and you cannot walk on Arroyo Burro beach( Hendrys beach) without getting oil on your feet/shoes. Almost impossible to clean. God forbid you take your dog on a walk down those beaches.
I grew up in SB in the 60s. Tar was washing up then. It's been washing up always. Do you know that the first real industry in SB was the harvesting of the natural asphalt that was above ground and visible.
3:05 I had no idea there was a president named "Lyden Johnson." As a bigger insult the narrator says this over the correct name "Lyndon Johnson" appearing on screen. Even with the narrator getting this wrong it could have been easily corrected in editing.
As a roughneck, I wish this kind of thing didn't happen. It tarnish's the hard work I have done to make sure my end was held high. But I have always been the low man
I can remember the tar balls in the beach sand. I was born in Santa Barbra in ‘63. My dad was a diver, and we spent a lot of time at thousand steps. Leadbetter. East beach. Back in the day. Turpentine or gasoline was the way they cleaned that heavy tar off of us. Seamed normal to have tar between your toes. (Thinking about when my brother and I were merely kids.) Swimming, surfing and volleyball. Oh yea! Way back, when you could get big “bugs” (lobster), and big abalone.
Within one minute, I knew they wouldn't install a surface casing. Things have only gotten worse as we don't seem to learn from previous mistakes. We deserve Mother Nature's wrath, and we're feeling it now.
As an SB local and somebody close to the industry, this was very well covered and conveyed. Nice job on finding the historical photographs and using photos from the Refugio spill to illustrate oiled beaches with modern pictures.
i think youre confusing "diameter" and "thickness" of the casing... diamerter is the size... thickness generally refers to wall thickness of the metal itself usually measured in millimeters or fractions of inches... 70cm is a ludicrous wall thickness number for drill pipe
Did you mention "beach tar," blobs if sticky black stuff in the sand left from oul spills? My family would go to the beach in Santa Monica, CA from 1970-1972 and our beach blanket (an old bedspread) had hardedened, black tar if various spots.
Hey. The video was based on a story that’s not proven, a conspiracy. I thought the research on the diving techniques was interesting so I made a story. It was badly received because the audience want factually accurate stories. I tried to repost to clarify that it’s just a story and that the diving interested me but that didn’t fly. I don’t want the audience to feel like they can’t trust my videos. It’s not a conspiracy channel so it wasn’t aligned with the channel and I took it down.
I lived I. Redondo beach, (about 100 miles away from Santa Barbara) in 1999 and I have three rocks I picked up off the beach and all of them, I’d later found, had spots of tar and crude on them. To this day you can still smell it on the rocks as well and see it.
I think I've seen all the aircraft crash videos on TH-cam, so now it's feeding new these. The big difference is that in Aircraft videos they're like "We didn't know this could be a problem, but all the affected planes were retrofitted with this fix and it will never happen again", and the Shipping Industry is like "We knew was going to happen eventually, but we'd prefer to cut corners to save time and money, and 😮 shocked Pikachu face, can't believe this happened to us... I mean, not us personally, but our employees"
I'm a southern california native. I recall not seeing more than a few rigs at sea as a child. They now fill the horizon. This spill damaged our local ecosystem. The channel islands are unique ecosystems & you need a hard to get permit to step foot on many islands. But it's ok to pop up countless rigs & spew black sludge on them, because profit & corruption.
So the department that allowed them waivers around the standards got off scoot free and because union oil was granted a waiver they took all the responsibility sounds about right can’t ever hold the top accountable
another banger video! sadly i knew greed would have something to do with it. These oil companies got access to a life time deal for cheap and they still want to cut corners. I really could see know legit reason why they thought it would be a good idea to drill in short in the first place.
I'd really like more detail as to the grounds for asking for the exemption about the well casings as well as the rationale for the government agency granting it. Trivia note - that oil was still around that summer. I went to the beach as a kid and wound up with it all over me.
Those who fail to learn from their mistakes are given federal funding so they can continue to fund a government without ethics or morals. What'd you think was going to happen?
Oil company: lobbies for the absolute bare minimum safety regulations Also oil company: lobbies for exemption from the absolute bare minimum safety regulations
I'm guessing the wall thickness of the 16 inch pipe is meant to be 41 - 76 mm or 1.6 - 3 in. A 16in pipe with 16in wall thickness would be an impressive sight.
My father successfully represented the local fisherman in a lawsuit against the oil companies - one of his proudest "wins" in a long career serving the people of Santa Barbara. Thanks for putting this together! I was able to share it with his grandchildren and recount his small part in the story.
❤
And i bet they just paid out and no one went to jail in the corporation or politicians that waved safety.....
But it's money. far more important than any fisher.
@@chuckthebulland the lawyer got most of those “recovered funds”
The wind industry needs to stop off shore
And i bet NO ONE was ever held accountable from the corporation and politicians .. but if i poured a quart of oil into the sea i would be arrested and charged for environmental terrorism...
And yet corporate types wonder why the people are angry at their lobbying for unaccountability.
@@richardc020:They don’t give us a single thought, they simply don’t give a damn about We The People.
So basically they were like "Hey you guys, can we ignore that important safety stuff pretty please? What could possibly go wrong?" and then they found out what exactly can possibly go wrong
A tale old as greed.
And even then. They hit the dangers from Coast Guard and public, allowing it to spread even more!
The govt really dropped the ball on granting exceptions to the drilling requirements. They should have paid for the entire mess.
@@MrPLC999That’s what happens when politicians stand on reducing bureaucracy and red tape, sound familiar?
Lots of shots of Australia and New Zealand beaches 😅
So the US gov completely ignored the protests of people who actually live in the area in favor of making money...then they let safety standards be ignored ( in favor of money ) and then when things inevitably go wrong...a fine that's not even really a slap on the wrist gets levied and things carry on. I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
The greatest democracy indeed
This is not by the people for the people….that is a lie. Everyone keeps falling for
Dont call a handfull of criminals, whose names snd faces should be named "the government".
That's what governments do!
I'm not
I helped clean up the beaches and sea life from these spills in Ventura when I was a kid.. sad,messy and toxic! Gotta love dish detergent!! Worked like a charm!
When I was in high school there was a tanker collision in San Francisco bay that made a pretty big mess. The oil company even hired us older kids to shovel oil off the beaches. January 1971...that was the beginning of requiring tankers and chemical carriers to have double hulls, or at least they talked about it....
It is a good thing. Sadly it often takes major tragedy to get Government to increase their requirements. That being said often their requirements that they add actually do nothing.
But it seems like this was likely a good idea.
Same thing as seat belts. Most car companies wouldn't put them in because it cost them $12 more. They would even go on to lie to everyone, saying that they would jerk you around more if you were in an accident. Volvo I know, went and figured it out and got the 3-point seat belt almost all seat belts are today and made the patent public for everyone to use of no charge. After enough cases and politicians talking about suing them, they started doing it and put them into every car.
Now you bring up Big Pharma and shots.... and people can't understand that the same thing is happening here. They are harming us, and most people believe their propaganda... We need double-blind placebo testing for every single one and verify it 1, 3, 5, 10 years later. Hopefully RFK will help us with this.
I believe it wasn't until the Exxon Valdez that doubled hull vessels were required in California
3:07 LBJ is rolling in his grave after that slaughter of his name.
How could an English speaker not know how to pronounce Lyndon.
It’s an AI voice and in a typo they left out the n
38mil is a complete joke of a fine
Don’t worry
They got tax breaks to more than cover it😮
@@fastinradfordableget over yourself 😂😂😂😂
Tbf this was in the 60s. Today it’s be about 400 million adjusted for inflation…that’s was just the cost of clean up though.
@@redactedrider760638 million$ in cost is already adjusted, it was 4.5 mil. at the time. Also from napkin math, 4.2 million gallons of oil is something like 100000 barrels, so with modern prices oil itself would cost about 8 million.
@@Skills4J00 you gonna be ok?
@0:54 They sure had a... futuristic pick up back in the day.
IKR, Like damn Nissan been making the Nivara Frontier for a long time now
Its like it is time travel device..... oh the secrets it could tell.
That made made me laugh. He was probably like..".just send it"...after editing for a week.
Yeah I thought the same thing myself 😂
As a geophysicist I'm finding it fascinating hearing these stories of the industry's less than reputable past. Thanks for these videos!
So thought provoking on so many fronts:
- the tragic toll on wildlife, environment and local economy,
- the failure of regulatory oversight, and how those regulations are designed,
- and not least, the technical and engineering aspects of predicting overpressure, then preventing, and ultimately containing, the blowout...
We should be able to learn so much, yet the lessons never seem to stick.
So you should probably know about Coal Oil Point Seep?
@@taocffej sounds like something I'd be interested to know about. Is it an event or a feature, and which part of the world is it from/in? Guess I'll go google it...
The US is one part of the world I've never really worked in, so my knowledge of history there is even more sparse than my regional geology knowledge of those parts.
@
It is in the area that this video is about, the oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel between Santa Barbara, California and the Northen Channel Islands offshore.
The seep is directly off the beach adjacent to UCSB, University of California, Santa Barbara. They have a well known marine studies department, and having the Coal Oil Point Seep literally in their backyard, it is considered the most extensively researched marine petroleum seep in the world.
Oh, it’s a feature, not an event.
I worked at Santa's Village Standard station in 1968 and used to work ALL THE TIME. One night I got off and decided to drive as far south as I could and turn around at the middle of the night to come back. I made it to Santa Barbara on caffeine pills and loud music. I got off the road and went for a walk on the beach there and help me stay awake. I took my shoes off and felt just below the sand sitting on top was oil. It got all over the bottom of my feet. I had to prove I had made it this far from Santa Cruz so I saw a Santa Barbara City constuction sign with a flashing light on it and threw it in my trunk. It was great night. Thanks fort reminding me about it.
The subject matter is outstanding
The narration is even better
Thank you mate
👍🏻😀 thanks
Agree.
Another brilliant video mate. Always a pleasure learning about these events, even if they're a bit grim.
👍🏻
The subtlety with which you describe the environmental impact on both land and sea was masterful. You just stated the numbers, which speak bleakly for themselves. Top notch, as always.
👍🏻
But can't pronounce Lyndon. It is Lin-don, not Ly-dun.
When it comes to money versus the lives and livelihood of people, money almost always wins. That is the real tragedy and the sad reality.
My cousin and I were working on his cross country pilots license from Modesto - Paso Robles- Burbank. We flew over it I was 14 years old. We were overwhelmed by the sight.
Extensive and thorough research combined with your professional narration makes your channel a gem of an algorithm gift. Subscribed.
Growing up in Santa Barbara, I was always told the tar on the beach was from natural seeps and was used by the Chumash to waterproof their boats before the Spanish settlers arrived. I was also told that the drilling platforms were a necessary evil that reduced the pressure feeding the seeps.
Well, back in the late 1700s and into the 1800s, the Spaniards spoke of finding tar balls on various beaches along the SoCal, so ....
Later technology to counter this is a BOP (Blowout protection valve) that closes the drill line and vents it carefully, instead of uncontrolled blowout. Pressure when hitting a pocket of gas/oil can be tremendous.
Have you done a video about the first drill platform accident?
I just keep thinking about how we even figured out how to clean up the ocean, what we tried first, how they made the first oil platform and why it failed, everything! Even finding marine deposits of oil, and building platforms feels like it should be impossible let alone cleaning up after it.
I would have to research that. 👍🏻
Breathtaking and callous negligence. The sort of thing that happens when you have a government agency (USGS) in bed with regulated corporate entities)
Oh, them. An earthquake channel community I follow often calls them USBS. They seem to continually downgrade recorded earthquakes and don't acknowledge the obvious link between EQs and fracking fields.
Something I wish the video had gone into more detail on was the nature of the request for the waiver - and the reason the USGS provided it.
@@VanillaMacaron551 How many of those earthquakes occurred in those areas?
It's heartbreaking to think about all the casualties, even though the lives lost weren't human. Thousands of animals gone 😢 great video as always
I remember watching the Exxon Valdez incident on tv as a boy.
Lost their lives in immense suffering too.
remember the feel good commercials advertising dish liquid to clean birds?
@@mike_w-tw6jd I sure do. Dawn dish soap really cashed in on that.
unfortunately bureaucrats and lobbyists are not considered wildlife
I worked on Platform C as a Welders Assistant/ Fire Watch in the early 90s. My boss "MacGyver", was a contractor, and was basically on his third rebuild of all the splashworks, and everything else that rusts away. The Oil is Sandy and thick, causing scour in the 48" lines and sometimes they burn a hole and we have to put a HUGE patch cover over it (yea, its easy AND fast) NOT! ...strap it down, but what a mess! Was a fun job.
I remember this: I was around 10 or 11 growing up in Vinetura, California, in 1969. I can remember the spil and the storm like it happened yesterday crazy to see this and think it was like 56 years ago
Drilling is a seemingly simple thing at first. We had 3 natural gas wells on our property in western New York on the medina formation. The shut in pressure on those wells (not flowing, just dead headed) was 900 psi. The gas used in your stove is 3.5" water column. That's about half what it takes to suck soda up a straw. The average water heater is 30,000BTU, natural gas is about 1000 BTU per cubic foot, so 30 cubic feet per hour of run time. Each of those wells produced 20,000 cubic feet per day on average. To say they could be dangerous was an understatement.
I was in Grade 6 at Washington School. We could see clouds of cement being dumped over the side down at the platform. Even at that age, I knew it would never create a cap by the time any of it hit the bottom - if it hit the bottom at all.
I lived in Santa Barbara for years, grew up on the central coast, been looking at those ugly oil rigs my whole life. Had no idea the 3rd worst oil spill in US history happened here.
I remember when it made it to San Diego. It was in large lumps that got washed ashore and then a little sand washed over it. Even if the beach looked clean at first glance, you would end up with tar on the bottom of your feet after a walk.
thanks for not asking for likes&subs in every video. gonna listen to this one before bed
Good point!
🤣 please enjoy your day. 👌🏻
I live in orange county, half way between the leak and San Diego. You can still find clumps of oil tar after storms and on hot days sone beaches still smell like crude.
That's from hundreds of natural seeps, with the largest being at the Coal Oil Point Seep Field. California Longshore current travels from north to south, so the petroleum will travel in that direction. It's why one will almost always see an iridescent sheen on So Cal waters, especially at Goleta, Carpenteria, Ventura, and further south.
Just for Coal Oil Point, it's estimated at 100 to 150 barrels of oil per day. I think La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles is coming from the same formation. 500,000 years of seeping.
I grew up in Santa Barbara. There are big, huge rocks made of dried-up oil on the beach. They are not from the spill, but rather from past events caused by oil that naturally leaks from the ground. That place if just full of oil and earthquakes can cause releases/leaks. There is evidence that past earthquakes have caused spills of their own. It is kind of a freaky place to live.
Fires, floods, mudslides, earthquakes. I got out of there and moved to the Midwest. It is cheaper, and I can deal with tornadoes and blizzards better than all those other disasters. Plus, the people are so much nicer out here. Much friendlier.
grew up in the midwest, wish I was home .
@@aredditor4272 nice to see someone else that knows about the seeps. a few years ago I read the seeps are slowing down because of the offshore drilling.
Exxon biggest tax payer in the city and county . And we pay highest gas prices in all of the USA . This is one sided , it’s time to get these jobs back and people back to work !!! 2025!!
I'm too young, born in 1965 to actually remember that incident but I was raised about a mile from.the beach South of Santa Barbara in Los Angeles next to LAX airport. My neighborhood is on the Northside of LAX and the airport is actually on the property of my neighborhood called Westchester /Playa Del Rey. The Southside of LAX is El Segundo which is the home of the second Chevron refinery built in California in the early 1900s creating the company town of El Segundo which is Spanish for The Second. The refinery has oil tankers that drop anchor about a quarter mile off the beach near Dockweiler State Beach and El Porto , there is an Edison power plant also on the beach at that location.
When the tankers drop anchor they have underwater pipe connections that they couple to and crude oil gets pumped through underwater pipeline to the refinery and sometimes refined gasoline or other products are pumped to the tankers for delivery elsewhere.
Growing up surfing and sailing and fishing and snorkeling I spent a lot of time in the water of the Santa Monica Bay. In the location of El Porto (45th St) is a great surfspot during good swells and during the 1970s and 1980s when you were in the water at that location we would constantly get thick black tar on our surfboards our shorts our feet and hands, it smelled very strong of gas in the water at times and the only way to get that tar off of you was paint thinner or gasoline. If it got on your surf trunks it was not likely to get out the stain completely. Many years and many articles of clothing and sandals and beach towels ruined by the leaking crude oil. It's still that way today. The connection and disconnection of the underwater pipeline spills crude every time and they do that a couple times every week.
If the people in charge were held personally accountable for all the damage, these things wouldn’t happen.
The port and mission originally shipped cow hides. Before the Panama Canal the ships sailed around South America from Boston to pick up ship loads of dried cow hides for the east coast leather industry in Boston and New York.
Read "Two Years Before the Mast" for the story....
Still smashing it as always mate, happy to be an early day watcher!
Thanks. That’s awesome to hear
And that's just a drop in the ocean of oil that gets released naturally due to earthquakes.
@0:54 I love the antique pickup truck. That being said it is very sad to hear about all the poor animals who suffered and lost their lives.
Actually, that there was a genuine time-machine built into a pickup, so it wouldn't be seen out of place!
I lived just North of Santa Barbara in Santa Maria when this happened. It changed the way a lot of people think.
always takes a tradegy
This is an example of what can happen when rich commercial entities capture regulatory bodies.
"Yeah yeah, safety and the environment are nice and all but what about our PROFITS!?"
Didn’t the US geological survey dept approve the changes to the plan?
@brkbtjunkie Yeah, but they're sadly not immune to political pressure. Where money equals power, profit will always trump safety
@@foo219Especially when the boss puts deregulators in charge of depts that should be regulating. You can expect a lot more of these type of events over the next four years.
@markc17 Alas. I wish you well.
@@markc17knowing how Harris handled the southern border one should be thankful for the change in government.. it’s frightening to think of how many incompetent people are now overseeing this industry
What do they say, safety regulations are written in blood? In an oligarchy regulators are captured and obey the oligarchs that don't care about the blood of proletarians. Thank you, excellent as always.
well said
I'm fascinated by this history of Santa Barbara Channel oil extraction. Thank you.
Another brilliant video. No sensation, just facts. I've said this before yet I cannot work out why you don't have at least a million subs. When you look at the channels that have multi-million subs and put out garbage I have to wonder about the mental capacity of those subscribers.
On another note was this disaster ever investigated? Did money change hands? Some people should have ended up jail.
Since the Supreme Court has given corporate entities the same rights as a human, the Oil company should be jailed yet....walks away with barely a slap on the pinky.
Prior to the Exxon Valdez incident, I sailed on an Exxon oil tanker into Valdez, Alaska. They were the most safety conscious company with which I sailed.
I loved the black and white picture of the sea shore when they were discussing the 1870s era. It was a picture of a Ford 150 extended cab pickup truck. Damn I wish I had purchased Ford stock a long time ago!!
Your content is great, but the AI you use is really distracting and hurts the credibility of the material. Good facts paired with fake photos is like eating prime rib with ketchup
Which are fake?
@@lostpony4885 0:54 Pretty sure that is VW Amarock in black and white footage... Even if i'm mistaken on the model and that is legit photo, there is clear cases of AI produced images and tons of stock well as mixing footage from different decades that make it hard to follow on hows the tech and culture at the time of the incident. Like with sub failure video from 80's, talks about gps positioning ship and shows different ship that was launched with in couple years. Also on video about the adventure ship burning and how there was no escape routes from the engine room, while shows photo of ship with its rear deck hatches open into engine room...
I get there is limited amount of footage, but maybe instead pick the photos you have, run them trough AI to create 3D model and use that instead or mark the ones that are not the target ship as examples.
You just wanted to say AI didn’t you?
Grew up in L.A. as a kid in late 60's early 70's and when I went to the beach my feet got covered in tar..old timers said it was always that way because of oil seeping up from the ground out at sea. After they started drilling for the oil beach sand cleaned up...
i really dig your channel. i look forward to each weeks videos. i know there is a pronunciation differential between our 2 cultures, and i don't mean to be a grammar demon. but Lyndon Johnson's first name in america is pronounced 'Lind-un'. when you say it at normal speed it sounds like 'Lind-in". thanks for the videos. most older people will know who you're talking about if you simply say LBJ.
👍🏻😀 thanks for that
He's really quite good at receiving pronunciation feedback; I noticed in this video UNOCAL got the standard pronunciation, where it had his intuitive pronunciation in earlier videos. And agree entirely - these are always high quality, succinct videos
Crude oil seeps into the ocean all the time naturally anyway, spill is not good but it will biodegrade naturally as it always does.
That 1897 Nissan Frontier was badass.
Holy cow, 69 bar is 1000psi !! That's a lot of pressure.
About 1/2-1/3 of my hydraulic lines max pressure on my forklifr
Not that high, we pump much higher pressure than that on a regular basis in the oilfield today. Most of the lines are rated for 10,000 psi, 15,000 burst.
Great job covering this event, i remember the beaches even a few years later having tar like chunks sprinkled around as they came inshore over time.
👍🏻
I find this narrator has a hypnotic voice and captivates me.
As the old saying goes "Incidents don't happen in a vacuum, they are the culmination of multiple bad decisions". At multiple points a single person could have stopped the chain, including the Gov whose job it was, and instead they subverted their own regulations to prevent this!!!!!! IMO the oil company should also have lost their lease rights (in addition to fine and cleanup costs), and the geological survey should have lost the ability to allow exceptions.
That would leave the industry at the whim of crooked government.
The "Deep Horizon" disaster was approved of by myriad regulators. Violations were OK'd and even encouraged by various regulators, not just one guy. Then when the well blew out, the regulators cited the offences they had approved earlier.
Do not expect government agents to be truthful.
Since the leases were under federal authority I'm not sure the Givernor could have stopped this.
@susangrulkowski2710 What? Gov is short for the government, as in fed gov, not the governor
Single best explanation of casing. --from industry expert.
so you’re saying I got something right for once? 🤣
Agreed.
So they saved a few thousand dollars in doing less prep work for the drill site, and potentially would have sped up the production date by a couple weeks. Some of those thousands "saved" would still have been spent, but this time on campaign donations and/or kickbacks to the politicians who got the approvals pushed through. All the damage to the coast, wildlife, and local business, as well as the effects on the locals lives, just to squeak out what?... tens, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars vs. doing it the right way? It's a perfect story of corporate greed bulldozing everything around for a bit more profit into the hands of a tiny group of people who already have more money than they will ever need.
working for exxon syu (san ynez unit)i decommissioned the OS&T(oil storage&treatment) vessel hondo platform , set harmony&heritage jackets.ultimately brought LFC online supporting all three.
Your seem like a decent chap, one who’s educated in our planet’s majority seascape environment,I’m a native of Liverpool myself and just a few years older, so I’m just curious as to what your thoughts are regarding the sad raft of petroleum disasters that have blighted our oceans and seas from San Francisco to the Caspian Sea and whilst I am impressed by your work here I am compelled to ask what you yourself feel regarding the seemingly endless deaths of our fellow man and how you envisage the future, ideally or abstract. Much respect Sir, Dave. 📚🇬🇧☘️
Hey Dave
I think I’m a pragmatist.
I’m not a fan of big oil. I think that often decisions are made in the name of profit with little thought to the consequences. That’s true of almost any large corporation run by committee. But chemicals can have such a huge impact on the environment and people.
On the other hand I drive a petrol car, I find the engineering incredible and I have a huge amount of respect for the people who work in oil, often putting their lives at risk to keep the economy turning.
We would not be as advanced as we are without it.
I think in the future, we will all probably need to make conscious decisions about our use of energy. Oil is a short term decision. It’s quick and easy. To change our behaviour we need to make decisions today that affect our future but they’re not as easy as oil. A bit like exercise. It sucks to do but we know it’s good for us.
In reality I think we need to use up all the oil so we run out of options and have to adopt new technology. How long that takes, I don’t know.
For now we rely on it.
@ my friend I am grateful for you taking the time to reply here and as someone who was born and raised on the banks of the river Mersey and the culture was cammell lairds shipyard and a city apart from the rest of England buoyed up by the Eireann diaspora and the fantastic mix of global people including the oldest Chinese community in Europe you can hopefully see the outlook we had rather than the inwards looking perspective that the majority of Britain has held onto over the years and after watching many of your uploads now I was compelled to ask you for a few of your ideas and your thoughts on a little bit more than what you offer us all in your wonderful work and well crafted posts and I’m not being nosey but I assume that you’re a native antipodean and that you seem to be a chap who would be quite inquisitive regarding your family history as indeed I am and so I guess I’m just trying to explain my curiosity and reasoning for being inquisitive. We lost our grandfather in #WW2 aboard the HMS Celendine in 1943 and our matriarchal grandfather served in the RAF and once again I am most grateful for your time responding to me and your channel is pretty special and I hope you continue posting on it for a long time to come. Best wishes from the city of Liverpool and keep shining your light brightly Sir. ⚽️🇬🇧☘️🙏📚🏴
It's a good thing we as a society are so reactionary or we might need regulations to control this kind of malpractice. Oh, right, we do have them but so many seem to ignore them or have them removed for profit. Profit. Thanks, mate. Take care, fair winds
You always tell a great story, well done on your superb delivery. Defo my favourite channel.
😀👌🏻 thanks for that
Did anything happen to the idiots that okayed the companies' ignoring regulations? They all belong in jail!
Fun fact - one of the platforms was used in the movie Face/Off as the exterior of the magnetic boot prison.
Love the story telling mixed with relevant footage
I remember in the back in the 90s me and my family went to the Santa Barbara beach and I got a glob of crude oil that had washed up on the beach stuck to my foot, it took several days to get it all off.
Use vegetable oil next time. You won't walk a So Cal beach very far without getting petroleum on your feet. There's hundreds of natural seeps on and offshore.
mineral oil softens it, messy cleanup for sure
There’s still a bunch of oil globs washing up on El Capitan state beach in Goleta to this day.
Yeah and you cannot walk on Arroyo Burro beach( Hendrys beach) without getting oil on your feet/shoes. Almost impossible to clean. God forbid you take your dog on a walk down those beaches.
Much of that oil is from natural seepage. There’s always been tarballs and natural gas into the ocean directly offshore. Especially along the Mesa
I grew up in SB in the 60s. Tar was washing up then. It's been washing up always. Do you know that the first real industry in SB was the harvesting of the natural asphalt that was above ground and visible.
Chumash Indians used to use beach tar to seal their canoes.
@@kamakaziozzie3038don’t let facts get in the way of some juicy misinformation!
3:05 I had no idea there was a president named "Lyden Johnson." As a bigger insult the narrator says this over the correct name "Lyndon Johnson" appearing on screen. Even with the narrator getting this wrong it could have been easily corrected in editing.
As a roughneck, I wish this kind of thing didn't happen. It tarnish's the hard work I have done to make sure my end was held high. But I have always been the low man
I can remember the tar balls in the beach sand. I was born in Santa Barbra in ‘63. My dad was a diver, and we spent a lot of time at thousand steps. Leadbetter. East beach. Back in the day. Turpentine or gasoline was the way they cleaned that heavy tar off of us. Seamed normal to have tar between your toes. (Thinking about when my brother and I were merely kids.) Swimming, surfing and volleyball. Oh yea! Way back, when you could get big “bugs” (lobster), and big abalone.
I always used vegetable oil and dish soap to cut the tar.
@ that works good too. I was very little and didn’t really grasp that damage caused from oil spills.
So happy your channel is successful! While I watched the new video 500 other viewers did too. Even my bbf is now hooked on ws 😅
😀 thanks
Well told as usual. Interesting too!👏🇨🇮
👍🏻
I am to young to know about this . Great video !
Just finished a vid of yours, then this shows next second. Perfect.
Within one minute, I knew they wouldn't install a surface casing. Things have only gotten worse as we don't seem to learn from previous mistakes. We deserve Mother Nature's wrath, and we're feeling it now.
Are we, how?
"Let's just ignore all the safety regulations, what's the worst that could happen"
You make great videos👌🏻
As an SB local and somebody close to the industry, this was very well covered and conveyed. Nice job on finding the historical photographs and using photos from the Refugio spill to illustrate oiled beaches with modern pictures.
And this is why oil and gas, coal, hydro and nuclear would always have a bad name. Someone wants to save money and do things cheap.
Santa Barbara is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen.
Thank you for having metric and the correct way to measure things.
i think youre confusing "diameter" and "thickness" of the casing... diamerter is the size... thickness generally refers to wall thickness of the metal itself usually measured in millimeters or fractions of inches... 70cm is a ludicrous wall thickness number for drill pipe
I laughed at that myself. It's a ludicrous thickness for a 16 inch Naval cannon.
Did you mention "beach tar," blobs if sticky black stuff in the sand left from oul spills? My family would go to the beach in Santa Monica, CA from 1970-1972 and our beach blanket (an old bedspread) had hardedened, black tar if various spots.
Hi. Really enjoy your work. Just curious, why did you delete your first and second videos on the Nordstream pipeline sabotage?
Hey. The video was based on a story that’s not proven, a conspiracy. I thought the research on the diving techniques was interesting so I made a story. It was badly received because the audience want factually accurate stories.
I tried to repost to clarify that it’s just a story and that the diving interested me but that didn’t fly.
I don’t want the audience to feel like they can’t trust my videos. It’s not a conspiracy channel so it wasn’t aligned with the channel and I took it down.
I lived I. Redondo beach, (about 100 miles away from Santa Barbara) in 1999 and I have three rocks I picked up off the beach and all of them, I’d later found, had spots of tar and crude on them. To this day you can still smell it on the rocks as well and see it.
Well done piece
I think I've seen all the aircraft crash videos on TH-cam, so now it's feeding new these.
The big difference is that in Aircraft videos they're like "We didn't know this could be a problem, but all the affected planes were retrofitted with this fix and it will never happen again", and the Shipping Industry is like "We knew was going to happen eventually, but we'd prefer to cut corners to save time and money, and 😮 shocked Pikachu face, can't believe this happened to us... I mean, not us personally, but our employees"
Who is Lie-Den Johnson??? Oh wait, you mean LIN-den Johnson. Yeah, I remember who that guy was.
Incredible video
👍🏻 thanks
I'm a southern california native. I recall not seeing more than a few rigs at sea as a child. They now fill the horizon. This spill damaged our local ecosystem. The channel islands are unique ecosystems & you need a hard to get permit to step foot on many islands. But it's ok to pop up countless rigs & spew black sludge on them, because profit & corruption.
Government gets millions for lease. Oil company billions. We get dead fish & a violently protected monopoly on energy
Photo at 12:38 is on Oahu, not Rincon break.
So the department that allowed them waivers around the standards got off scoot free and because union oil was granted a waiver they took all the responsibility sounds about right can’t ever hold the top accountable
0:47 that doesn’t look like the 1870s to me 😂
good thing we learn from this kind of thing so we don't repeat it on a bigger scale.
I grew up going to Carpinteria as a kid every summer. I wonder if this is why there is so much tar on the beach.
another banger video! sadly i knew greed would have something to do with it. These oil companies got access to a life time deal for cheap and they still want to cut corners. I really could see know legit reason why they thought it would be a good idea to drill in short in the first place.
I'd really like more detail as to the grounds for asking for the exemption about the well casings as well as the rationale for the government agency granting it.
Trivia note - that oil was still around that summer. I went to the beach as a kid and wound up with it all over me.
Those who fail to learn from their mistakes are given federal funding so they can continue to fund a government without ethics or morals. What'd you think was going to happen?
Oil company: lobbies for the absolute bare minimum safety regulations
Also oil company: lobbies for exemption from the absolute bare minimum safety regulations
I'm guessing the wall thickness of the 16 inch pipe is meant to be 41 - 76 mm or 1.6 - 3 in. A 16in pipe with 16in wall thickness would be an impressive sight.
I've never seen "Mantecito" before.