MAJOR ‘WAKE-UP CALL’
Marin witnesses recall massive oil spill of 50 years ago
Fifty years ago this week, Marin County and San Francisco residents woke up to one of the worst environmental disasters ever to occur in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the early morning of Jan. 18, 1971, two Standard Oil tankers collided in dense fog several hundred yards outside the Golden Gate and spilled more than 800,000 gallons of thick bunker fuel oil. Hours later, oil began to wash up on San Francisco and Marin County beaches and smothered more than 7,000 birds in the toxic fuel. All but a few hundred birds died despite extensive efforts to save them over the next several weeks.
Tens of thousands of volunteers — from local residents to farmers to hippies and doctors — flocked to beaches to attempt to protect cherished habitats such as Bolinas Lagoon and to save as much of the wildlife as possible.
The disaster sparked the beginning of environmental organizations and influenced the creation of national marine sanctuaries such as the Farallon Islands a decade later to ban oil drilling off the Bay Area coastline.
“I think the Standard Oil tanker spill off the Bay Area was the biggest wake-up call in terms of what could happen to our coast when you have a big oil
spill and you have no capability whatsoever to clean it up,” said Richard Charter, a senior fellow with the Ocean Foundation, who helped create several national marine sanctuaries along the California coast.
As the oil and dying birds washed up on beaches, it became readily apparent how significantly unprepared the government agencies and Standard Oil were to respond to such a catastrophe.
“So it was up to an army of volunteers to figure out how to respond to this stuff,” said Burr Heneman of Point Reyes Station, who was among the thousands of residents who volunteered.
At the Bolinas Lagoon, residents built makeshift oil booms out of logs, cables and hay to prevent more oil from seeping into the estuary with the incoming tide. Elia Haworth, Bolinas Museum history curator and assistant director, described in a recent writeup how Bolinas resident Tom D’Onofrio marshaled residents to build the boom.
“Responding to D’Onofrio’s urgent calls, resourceful locals, like boat builder John Armstrong, brought logs, trucks, boats, cable, lumber, wheelbarrows, shovels, rakes, and gloves, while hundreds more gathered on the Stinson Beach side of the channel,” Haworth wrote. “Toby’s Feed Store and local horse owners rushed tons of hay and straw to the beach for boaters to pack along the boom, and others spread it along the shore.
“At first Marin County and Standard Oil officials ordered them to stop, but the young people — honed by 1960s counter-culture activism — and the determined older residents kept working,” Haworth wrote. “Eventually, Standard Oil fully supported the locals with money, equipment, and resources.”
Meanwhile, Bolinas photographer Ilka Hartmann captured the devastation
with her camera. Hartmann’s striking images of oil-soaked volunteers and of dead ducks and grebes coated in the thick oil and straw have been published throughout the world, according to Haworth.
The oil boom at Bolinas Lagoon, while primitive, proved effective at preventing more oil from entering and poisoning the important estuary used by migratory birds, Charter said.
“When you get an oil spill into one of these coastal features like an estero, river mouth or a bay, it layers into the sediments like a very nasty chocolate cake,” Charter said. “Once the oil is shielded from air exposure, they actually have learned that it never really breaks down.”
Years after the spill, Heneman said it wasn’t uncommon for residents and visitors returning from a day at Stinson Beach to have to wash off the tarballs stuck to their feet.
As a 29-year-old living at Stinson Beach in 1971, Heneman helped create a communications hub for the bird-cleaning efforts. While well-intentioned, these popup centers were “somewhat chaotic” in their organization and ill-informed in their practice in the beginning, he said. Following the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, the advice was to clean birds using mineral oil to break down the crude oil and then use cornmeal to wipe the residue off.
This method “totally destroyed
the structure of the feathers,” Heneman said.
Standard Oil eventually flew out a British wildlife biologist who urged volunteers to use dishwashing soap instead — a practice still used to this day.
“If we had known that at the beginning as the first waves of oiled birds were coming in, a lot more would have survived,” Heneman said.
The nonprofit organization International Bird Rescue was formed following the 1971 spill. The organization has since worked on 225 spills and other bird-related disasters on most continents.
“It really was the birth of organized oiled wildlife response,” said JD Bergeron, the group’s executive director.
The organization is celebrating its 50th year by calling for residents to take daily actions to protect the environment.
Organizing supply chains was also an issue in the days before texting, emails and the internet, Heneman said.
Meeting at the Lions Club in San Rafael, an ad hoc group of people — including Heneman, a friend who worked at Standard Oil, a longtime state wildlife officer, College of Marin researcher Gordon Chan and several members of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory — discussed creating a communications hub to organize the response efforts. The Richardson Bay Audubon Center was ultimately
chosen.
Another group founded shortly after the spill was the West Marin Environmental Action Committee. Recently, the environmental group convinced the Marin County Board of Supervisors to pass an ordinance requiring any construction of offshore oil facilities off Marin’s coast to first receive voter approval.
“Dirty offshore oil drilling threatens our vibrant coastal communities, which play a key role in our valuable coastal economies and tourism and recreation industries,” said Morgan Patton, the committee’s executive director. “We stand against offshore oil drilling and encourage the Biden administration to permanently protect our coasts.”
The 1971 oil spill was not the worst to occur off the San Francisco coast. On March 6, 1937, an Associated Oil Co. tanker was struck by a luxury passenger boat in thick fog a mile off the Golden Gate. The crash spilled more than 2 million gallons of oil, which washed up on Marin and San Francisco beaches and killed thousands of birds.
While later oil spills such as the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska prompted federal regulatory changes for oil transport, tankers still enter San Francisco Bay on a daily basis and other spills have occurred since then, Charter said.
In 2007, the Cosco Busan cargo ship crashed into the Bay Bridge, causing the worst oil spill in San Francisco Bay in decades. An estimated 53,569 gallons of bunker fuel poured from the hull of the 902-foot container ship, oiling 69 miles of shore, closing fisheries and killing more than 6,800 birds.
“When something like that happens that really is so devastating to a community, there is a long memory,” Charter said of the 1971 spill. “People don’t forget. I think it’s important that society doesn’t forget that you can’t clean up oil spills on this coast, period. It’s just not technologically possible. We don’t have the equipment or wherewithal to do it.”