62 / Chapter 3
disasters discussed in the preceding chapters. No one is responsi-
ble for a hurricane or tornado, but when human error is involved,
there is somewhere to place blame. Someone—most often a cor-
poration—must fi nance the clean-up efforts. Often, however, this
accountability introduces confl icts that only slow things down.
The incident that triggered Hartley’s comment was the January
1969 blowout of a Union Oil drilling rig offshore from Santa Bar-
bara, California. Efforts to cap an initial leak of natural gas caused
a massive build-up of pressure. The pressure, in turn, pushed oil
and gas up through fi ve ruptures in the sea fl oor. Because the com-
pany lacked the tools and technology to control a spill of this size,
it took workers eleven days to cap the well (although it leaked for
months to come). Meanwhile, the oil had created an eight-hundred-
square mile slick. Oil reportedly muted the sound of the waves as
they washed ashore and polluted over thirty-fi ve miles of coastline.
Each wave carried the oil-coated carcasses of seals, dolphins, count-
less fi sh, and some four thousand seabirds. This fi gure dramatically
underestimates the number of birds affected because of the inade-
quate techniques used to document bird mortality at the time.^3 The
Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network describes the rescue efforts:
Volunteers were recruited to pluck oiled birds from local
beaches. Grebes, cormorants and other seabirds were so
sick, their feathers so soaked in oil that they were not diffi -
cult to catch. Birds were bathed in Polycomplex A-11, med-
icated, and placed under heat lamps to stave off pneumo-
nia. The survival rate was less than 30 percent for birds that
were treated. Many more died on the beaches where they
had formerly sought their livelihoods. Those who had man-
aged to avoid the oil were threatened by the detergents used
to disperse the oil slick.^4Estimates collected by the National Research Council indicate
that 380 million gallons of petroleum make their way from vari-
ous sources into the world’s oceans each year.^5 There are no pre-