Santa Barbara's 1969 deep rig drilling blowout

 

California's oil rig disaster past: Santa Barbara 1969

 

To read  full news article please click "1969"

The following quote is from the above article

As the oil spill disaster worsens in the Gulf of Mexico, Californians may recall the last time a major oil rig accident occurred that fouled our own coast for many years.

On January 29, 1969 a blowout occurred on Union Oil Co. oil rig some six miles off the coast of Summerland, Calif.  Similar to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the 1969 accident involved a natural gas blowout from a well nearly 3,500 ft. below the ocean floor. The short term fix by capping the the break created a much larger problem as pressure began building undersea that caused breaks along a fault on the ocean floor that vented out thousands of gallons of oil and gas.

While Gulf Coast rigs deal with hurricanes from year to year, designing offshore drilling rigs for California has its own challenges being in a region laced with known and unknown fault systems along the coast.

For more than a week, some 200,000 gallons of oil spread out over 750 miles, coating the California coastline for more than 30 miles with sludge from Rincon Point to Goleta along the Santa Barbara shoreline. The oil slick would later impact Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands.

Even after a permanent fix was applied to the undersea rupture, smaller amounts of oil continued spilling out along the coast for months. end quote.

My wife knows a lot about this incident because she was living in Santa Barbara then.