Madeline Stano of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment went by the scene of the oil spill in Santa Barbara. The oil spill happened Tuesday May 19th when a pipe owned by Plains All American Pipeline ruptured -- pouring around 105,000 gallons into the Pacific Ocean.
The area spoiled by the oil spill was a rare, globally unique area due to it's biological diversity. Workers are trying to sponge up the oil but it's a long, time consuming process.
The Refugio spill is much smaller than the 3 million-gallon oil spill that struck the Santa Barbara waterfront in 1969 and gave birth to the environmental movement in the United States.
But environmentalists said this latest accident hit hard, because it is soiling the Gaviota coast, a rare Mediterranean-climate region where northern and southern plants and wildlife meet. There are only five such regions in the world, all of them located at the western edges of continents and all of them unique for their biological diversity.
Because it has not been urbanized, the Gaviota coast region, which stretches from Goleta to the northern boundary of the Vandenberg air force base, also has been viewed as the healthiest remaining coastal ecosystem in southern California – at least, until now. “The Gaviota coast is a global resource that needs to be attended to with greater respect and restraint,” said Phil McKenna, president of the Gaviota Coast Conservancy, a nonprofit group that sought and failed to win a national park designation for the area during the administration of President George W Bush.
“When I saw that first image of oil oozing out of the bluffs, it was a nightmare.”
When will this insanity end?