Crisis Science Report (Santa Barbara Spill)

Hello group, this is my promised report about the Santa Barbara pipeline oil spill.

I did manage to get out to Refugio Beach and Santa Barbara and made a few promising contacts. The spill occurred between Refugio and El Capitan. The photo is from Apple Map – not showing the spill, but it may have oil in it because the area has natural oil seeps, which is why the response team used to train in this area in the 70’s. That should also be a clue as to why, although this was a major environmental disaster for those beaches, I would not classify it as a ‘crisis’ triggering the kind of holistic behavior and crisis science activity I want to explore in the conference. There is a lot of experience and planning now, so things were organized for the most part. Also the ecosystem itself is somewhat adapted to oil (though certainly not the quantities). I’d say there were crisis elements, but the impact was not socio-ecological to a great extent, and as I will try to explain, I think it is more an example of how we got rid of crisis science, and possibly have now hidden the need for it.

In contrast, the huge spill in France in the 70’s – Amoco Cadiz – which I responded to at the time, was truly a crisis on natural and human dimensions; Crisis meaning a situation that requires important decisions under extreme uncertainty. The SB spill response, 30 years after those early efforts, was much more informed and organized. Even the Oil company seemed relatively prepared (in contrast, for example, to the Alaska spill in which Alyeska had allowed all their response equipment and training to lapse when government pressure eased, so by the time of the Prince William Sound spill, almost nothing they demonstrated to our team in the 70’s was working). Heightened awareness (due to the Gulf Spill), community preparedness (due to contingency planning that started in the 70’s), prior experience (1969 Channel spill and others, plus many response groups), and long-term studies (the area has natural oil seeps and UCSB is only a few miles away, right on the coast) all make this more routine than crisis, except for the size of the problem. Hence the main issues were scaling up. Except for those who were aware of the beaches and wildlife, the overall community was relatively unaffected, except for the tremendous influx of responders filling the hotels and restaurants – a boon for business, actually. But otherwise, it was a very pleasant sunny day in Santa Barbara – it took some work for me even to find the spill and I saw no sign of it on the beaches East of Goleta. People were aware of it mostly from the news and some were concerned that it might be moving toward other areas. But the early phase cleanup was pretty intense, I was told, and a lot got picked up. Now, new sightings of floating oil become confused with the natural seeps in the area. It was a beach spill from a pipeline that flowed into the sea, so mostly near shore, about 100,000 gallons – small in comparison to the well-known incidents (Exxon Valdez was 300 times larger; Amoco Cadiz was 500 times larger; Gulf spill was 1500 times larger).

Still, there’s a lot we can say about crisis science that I would like us to explore in the conference. That pattern is that holism is triggered in a serious crisis affecting human dimensions via the environment, but reverts to disciplinary and institutional divisions as soon as we feel we are back in control. We define the risks and the boundaries of interest, we identify the “important” questions to some level of satisfaction, and then divide up the work so it can be performed expertly. But in a real crisis that is not possible because we don’t know what the questions are or where the problems will come from. Thus instant holism in a crisis, and holistic science if there is a scientific exploration effort; but still in a very rigorous and productive form. That was not the case here, for the reasons described – this was well controlled and everyone relatively organized with precise protocols and plans. However, there were elements of crisis and I think an argument that crisis science is still needed.

I attended a 4hr training for volunteers to clean beaches. That was organized to give the public a role that many want (in the early days there was some confusion in which residents were out on the beach trying to clean up without protective gear or safety measures, getting covered with highly toxic and dangerous oil). So there were elements of crisis in the first days, but tons of experience poured in quickly – which was unlike the big spills in the early days of oil spill response. Today, we could certainly experience the big crisis if something exceeded anticipated boundaries, and of course that is what we might be concerned about in climate change.

So, I suppose an interesting question for me is if we have now lost something important that is holistic by having it more planned and organized? I think so. We don’t plan for everything, but what happens is we have such a well planned set of protocols that those are paraded sometimes to the expense of revealing unknowns. We start to pretend more than we know, in the interest of ‘calming’ the public or ensuring public safety. So much of the spontaneous curiosity is prevented – the area is secured and professions do their work. It is highly likely that something important will be missed because we are so busy doing what we planned. I don’t mean that the planning is not the thing to do – it is essential; but at the same time we need to figure out how to preserve the holistic discovery mode of research that was characteristic of the first Spilled Oil Research Team and that became called crisis science at the time. There is a new crisis science team formed in DOI, just in the past 3 or 4 years, recognizing this need in all emergencies, for discovering new knowledge and advising about what is known. This incident in SB reinforces my opinion that these two need to be balanced – contingency planning as best we can do, and a crisis science team to discover what we might be missing.

In fact, this sentiment was voiced in the training workshop I attended, by some young and passionate individuals who tried to respond in the first day and were taken off the beach by police. The lack of a spontaneous exploration of the unknown aspects of the spill fostered a lot of skepticism about the government response and motives for ‘security’ – if it was also a way of hiding something. So, for public opinion alone it would be good to have a highly active science team freely investigating and reporting to the public and officials alike (which is what we did in the early days, before it got buttoned up in planned responses). The independent science team I imagine could also provide a level of assurance to the public with regard to information they are being given by the government – a form of validation on the one hand (it will probably turn out in most cases), and a form of fact checking on the other, since government officials are prone to be a bit too self-assured at times.

One example is pressure-washing rocks. I met a wildlife biologist with DOI (Fish and Wildlife) at breakfast and he wanted to know if there was any good literature on pressure washing, because it was a discussion how they would clean the rocks. I will send some. This was a major issue during the Amoco Cadiz spill because the oil company wanted fast cleanup for PR reasons and that resulted in doing a lot of pressure washing of the rocks. Later research showed that it did more harm than good because it destroyed the attached life and essentially sterilized the area, whereas oil is organic and will decompose over time, and some colonizers will survive. Hence, immediately after I arrived there was a critical question about the science that could make a big difference long-term.

Although I could not get to ground zero without going through the approval process with the Office of Emergency Management (there wasn’t time), I was able to observe some response activity, like booms shown in this photo to corral floating oil, oil skimmers and other vessels for deploying cleanup equipment (the “ocean defender” in the photo), and beach cleaning crews.

Sea birds, seals and other wildlife were certainly impacted and there are volunteer wildlife cleaning and treatment centers. You can find many pictures on the web.

Dr. John J. Kineman
President Elect
International Society for the System Sciences
john.kineman
(Ph) 303-443-7544: (M) 303-586-4969