The Santa Barbara Oil Spill

In 1968 Union Oil Company of California, which later became Unocal and is now part of Chevron, started drilling about six miles off the coast near Santa Barbara, California. One of the wells associated with Platform Alpha suffered a blowout on January 28, 1969. It took ten days before the leak could be plugged with cement slurry. It is estimated that up to a hundred thousand barrels of oil was spilled into the Santa Barbara Channel. The slick it created covered eight hundred square miles.

The lessons learned from Santa Barbara and other major events for the offshore oil and gas business are summarized in Chapter 2 of the book Offshore Safety Management. Probably the key lesson is that failure to manage safety and environmental performance can have a major impact on the public's perception of the industry.

Details of the Event

The company had received a waiver to use lower quality casing than required by regulation.

The crew had drilled to 3500 ft below the mud line but had cased only the top 239 feet of the hole.

As riggers were retrieving pipe in order to replace

a drill bit the amount of mud available became very low.

A natural gas blowout occurred. The workers tried to install a blowout preventer,

but failed. They then dropped casing into the hole and closed the hole with blind rams .

A large build up pressure in the well caused the uncased hole to be ruptured by high pressure gas that penetrated the surrounding soft sandstone. This led to the creation of five breaks in an east-west fault on the ocean floor. Oil and gas spilled from these breaks.

It took eleven days before the incident was brought under control. A second leak occurred some weeks later.

The environmental damage from the Santa Barbara spill was enormous. Many animals, including dolphins and sea birds, died (some because the detergents used to disperse the slick removed the natural water-proofing from their feathers). The area’s fishing industry was shut down and many beaches were covered in thick tar.

There were no fatalities or injuries to people.

Incident Analysis

The proximate cause of the event was that the drill bore casing was below federal and California standards. Unocal had been given permission to use the lower strength casing by the regulator: the U.S. Geological Survey. (The rig was more than three miles from the coast, so the State of California's more rigorous standards did not apply.

A root cause for the event was simply that well-established rules and procedures were not followed.

Long-term Impact

Other environmental catastrophes in the United States occurred at about the same time as the Santa Barbara spill. The most famous of these incidents was probably when the highly polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio burst into flame about six months later. There was also a heightened general awareness of air and water pollution in general, and of the impact of toxic chemicals such as DDT.

In response to the public outcry that followed the Santa Barbara incident and to other high profile events Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969. The Act required federal agencies to file impact statements for all actions that could have a significant ecological effect. Within two years President Richard Nixon had created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the Clean Air Act. 

National Earth Day was started the following year and Sierra Club membership doubled during this period.

The incident also showed that management at that time was not really attuned to environmental and safety issues, and illustrated in the quotation below.

I don't like to call it a disaster because there has been no loss of human life. I am amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds.

Fred L. Hartley, President of Union Oil Co.

Lessons for the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry

Three important lessons come out of the Santa Barbara incident:

1. Follow the rules2. Importance of public response.3. Economic impact.

Follow the Rules

The first and most obvious lesson learned is that rules and standards are generally well thought out, and they should be followed. Management must have very good reasons for circumventing the rules, and those in charge of daily operations need to know what the rules are, and to make sure that they are followed.

Public Response

The second lesson is that offshore accidents can generate very strong public response, even if the direct impact on the public is not that large. If an event is serious enough it will result in enormous publicity, new regulations and high costs associated with clean up and litigation (lessons being relearned in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon incident).

Economic Impact

The third lesson from the Santa Barbara spill is that events such as this can have enormous financial consequences (once more, a lesson being re-learned following Deepwater Horizon). Since the time of this event drilling off the coast of California has been severely restricted in spite of the fact that the additional revenues would provide welcome relief to that State’s stretched finances.

Elements of SEMP/SEMS

It is useful to examine incidents such as the Santa Barbara spill in light of the elements of the Safety and Environmental System (SEMS) rule, which is based on the API RP 75 Safety and Environmental Management Plan (SEMP). The elements of SEMP/SEMS are listed below.

1. Safety and Environmental Management

Information2. Hazards Analysis3. Operating Procedures4. Training5. Pre-Startup Review6. Assurance of Quality and Mechanical Integrity of

Equipment7. Safe Work Practices8. Management of Change9. Investigation of Incidents10. Emergency Response and Control11. Audit of Safety and Environmental

Management Program Elements12. Records and Documentation

Just two of the elements - Operating Procedures and Training - have been highlighted. They are closely related to one another. Based on the information that is available regarding this event that happened, after all, over forty years ago, there is no indication that failure to follow any of the other elements of SEMP were a contributing factor.