Escaping the Tar Pit: A Mammoth Task.

    California

    The year was 1976. I lived in Los Angeles. I was five.

    The United States was stoking American patriotism by celebrating its 200th year with Bicentennial celebrations. Newly-minted quarters, parades, and an election year helped push us beyond the Nixon and the Vietnam era.

    I had two favorite things: going to the beach and, oddly, the NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor. 

    The Nightly News was my favorite show, even after The Muppet Show aired later that year.  I thought of it as a live version of National Geographic magazine. And, although many of the news stories seemed far away, I followed them closely. 

    A man named Bruce Jenner won a gold medal at the Montreal Olympic Games. The Space Shuttle Enterprise was unveiled, and, as my Republican father bemoaned, Jimmy Carter became President. There was even a mass shooting nearby my home town at Cal State Fullerton. All covered by my hero, John Chancellor.

    Still, I was more focused on going to the beach and exploring the tidal pools of Laguna than watching the news. We went nearly every weekend. 

    But then, something big happened. Really big. 

 

Dec. 20, 1976: U.S. Coast Guard divers prepare to search the water around the Sansinena. Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times) https://www.latimes.com/visuals/photography/la-me-fw-archives-the-oil-tanker-sansinena-explodes-in-los-angeles-harbor-20181002-htmlstory.html

    The oil tanker Sansinena exploded in Los Angeles Harbor. 

    It was shown on television, discussed on the radio, and covered in the papers. The major catastrophe shut down the harbor and the beaches. The blast was felt throughout the coastal communities I regularly visited: Newport, Long Beach, Huntington Beach, Corona del Mar. The explosion shattered windows as far away as Dana Point, left several people dead, and put 1.3 million gallons of oil into the harbor. 

    

    The initial clean-up lasted weeks, and we didn't get to go to the beach for a month. I was glued to the television coverage. 

    To help my kid-brain understand why we couldn't go to the beach, my parents compared the sludge left at the bottom of the harbor to the La Brea Tar Pits. 

    Kindergarteners in the Los Angeles region know and fear the Tar Pits. On elementary school field trips to the Tar Pits, we held hands with our "safety-partners" and watched pistons slowly move back and forth, squishing the black, gooey nastiness that trapped massive ancient mammoths forever. We saw how they would struggle and die. Their skeletons were on display. Death was real. But the kicker was La Brea Woman, a human skeleton found in the tar!  No one wanted to be La Brea Woman. No one!

    So, after the Sansinena spill,  I could easily imagine myself stuck at the bottom of the ocean, only to be found 10,000 years later.

      But even before that captivating explanation of the oil in the harbor, I sensed how bad the oil spill was for the California coast. I had seen clumps of dried oil and dead birds wash up on the beaches of Santa Barbara for as long as I could remember. The 1969 Union Oil Company’s Platform A spill had already wreaked havoc on the Southern California coast.

     "Don't touch the oil," was my mom's mantra at the beach.

     That 1969 Union Oil spill was the largest oil spill in the US up until that time. It still ranks as the third largest oil spill in US history after the Deepwater Horizon and Ixtoc I disasters in the Gulf of Mexico.

    Forty-five years later, the Sansinena explosion is just one of many coastal tragedies caused by oil.  Today, I know more about the environmental legacy of these events. 

    We all know more today.  Action is needed.

    But, like lead poisoning, to cleanse ourselves of this problem may take hundreds of years.  Which, in this case will be much too long and much too devastating.  I remain hopeful.