Haskells Beach

Haskells Beach is popular for many locals, and is also enjoyed by the guests of Bacarra, a Ritz Carlton luxury hotel in Goleta California. This beach has a lot of powerful history.

In 1942, Japan bombed this strip of beach during Pearl Harbor.

Many years later, in 1969, a massive oil leak covered 800 square miles of coastline centered at Haskells Beach. America watched as the entire city pitched in to clean up the leak.

This event is why we celebrate Earth Day as a national holiday.

History

On January 28, 1969, a well drilled by Union Oil Platform A off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, blew out. At the time of the Santa Barbara Channel Oil Spill, it was the largest oil spill in U.S. waters, spewing more than four million gallons of oil and killing thousands of seabirds, dolphins, seals, and sea lions. Today it ranks third in size after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills.

As a reaction to this disaster, activists were mobilized to create organizations and regulations that are the foundation of our environmental protections today. On March 21, 1969, President Nixon came to Santa Barbara to see the spill and cleanup efforts, telling the crowd, “…the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.” During that same period, Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin saw the 800 square-mile oil slick from an airplane, which gave him the impetus to ratify a national day for environmental education, which he called Earth Day. On April 22, 1970, over 20 million Americans attended Earth Day teach ins and gatherings across the U.S., including a one-block long gathering organized by Community Environmental Council in Santa Barbara, that continues today as the annual Santa Barbara Earth Day Festival.  

National Outcomes 

Soon after these formative events, Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and a bi-partisan Congress adopted the Clean Water Act (1972), Coastal Zone Management Act (1972), and Endangered Species Act (1973). In 1970 and again in 1999, they also greatly strengthened the Clean Air Act, originally passed in 1963. In some cases this legislation passed with nearly unanimous support. 

Local Outcomes 

In the days, weeks, and months following the spill, local volunteers and activists worked heroically to respond to the devastation—cleaning oil-slicked wildlife, spreading straw on beaches to to sop up oil, documenting contamination, and creating political and activist organizations. Reporters also played a large role, capturing images of oil-plagued beaches and oil-blackened wildlife that were broadcast around the globe.