1969 Santa Barbara oil spill 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill The Santa Barbara oil spill occurred in January and February 1969 in the Santa Barbara Channel, near the city of Santa Barbara in Southern California. It was the largest oil spill in United States waters by that time, and now ranks third after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills. It remains the largest oil spill to have occurred in the waters off California. The source of the spill was a blow-out on January 28, 1969, from the coast on Union Oil's Platform A in the Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field. Within a
Xingang Port oil spill at the port began, triggering a fire which subsequently burned for 15 hours. The fire burned from oil that was released from a filled storage tank with a 90,000 ton capacity that collapsed as a result of the fire. Oil from other nearby tanks was, according to a Greenpeace report released several weeks after the incident, intentionally released to prevent the fire from expanding towards a tank containing dimethylbenzene, a flammable chemical. Although Chinese government officials reported that as little as 1,500 tonnes of oil spilled, a former University of Alaska marine conservation specialist, Rick Steiner, estimates the spill to