The 1969 Oil Spill That Launched the Modern Environmental Movement

If you were to gaze out over the California waves on this date in 1969, your eyes might encounter an incoming tide of thick, black filth. That's because on January 28 that year, a new drilling rig operated by Union Oil, Platform "A," suffered a blowout and was violently flooding the ocean with loads upon loads of crude.

The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill still ranks in the top tier of the United States' human-caused disasters; the only larger spills came from the 1989 Exxon Valdez crash and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon calamity. By the time workers sealed the Union well more than a week later, more than 4 million gallons of oil had escaped into the sensitive marine environment. Miles of California beaches were turned into hellish morasses of reeking petroleum, littered with the dead bodies of seals and sea lions and innumerable limp seabirds.