Today is 40th Anniversary of 1969 Santa Barbara “Oil Spill.”

Anti-oil sentiment exploded and remains a vitriolic cuse celebre’.

“In the anguished days immediately following the first great leak from Union Oil Company’s well in Santa Barbara Channel, scientists warned that animal and plant life in and around the affected waters might be permanently damaged. In retrospect, their dire predictions seem to have been overstated.

A study conducted by a team of University of California researchers discloses that the initial fears were exaggerated,” TIME magazine June 13, 1969.

Today is the 40^th anniversary of .the infamous Santa Barbara Oil Spill. Union Oil’s Platform A leaked some 100,000 barrels of crude oil blanketing local beaches and triggering the modern environmental movement.

Locally GOO (Get Oil Out) was formed and remains a robust mantra against the dreaded offshore oil industry. Over a thousand actvists swarmed to Santa Barbara to stop oil.

Oil spill scenes were broadcast and published worldwide.

TIME and others predicted decades of destruction. But, as its June 13, 1969 issue reported “Dr. Carl Hubbs, professor emeritus of marine biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, stated flatly at the time that the channel “will never be quite nat ural again.” Now, four months later, the channel’s ecology seems to have been restored to virtually its natural state — although oil seepage continues to smear city beaches.”

Santa Barbara sits over one of the largest natural oil seeps on the Earth and every day tar balls wash up on beaches sticking to feet and paws and engendering continuing ire.

When I moved to Santa Barbara nearly 30-years ago oil rigs were pointed out as the source of the tar with hateful venom. Actually they have nothing to do with it and may even reduce the pressure of the natural seepages.

The 1969 spill was, as noted, rapidly cleared up, and there does not appear to be long term damage that some predicted.

Nevertheless the residue is a widely held conviction that oil is bad and offshore oil production I evil and vile.

In recanting its most dire prediction TIME said, “No one knows what the long-range effects on marine life may be as a result of the continuing oil seepage. In any case, it appears that the offensive derricks will be around for decades to come. Last week a presidential panel recommended that drilling on the Union lease site, which has been halted for four months, be resumed. The panel contended that the best way to stop the leak is to exhaust the oil reservoir un der Union’s platform A — an undertaking that could last 20 years or more.”

Like so any other things hysteria is easy to wipe-up that no amount of logic or facts can offset.