State and local leaders gathered on Haskell’s Beach in Goleta on Monday to celebrate the removal of the last oil shore zone piers in California.
“Thirteen oil piers once dotted this beautiful beach. Today, as you can see, there are none,” said California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis at a press conference on the beach.
The celebratory event included statements from Santa Barbara County supervisors, Assemblyman Greg Hart, State Senator Monique Limon and others who stepped onto the sand at Haskell’s to commemorate the successful removal of Goleta’s oil piers that had been standing since the late 1920s.
“In those days, the oil industry was completely unregulated. Folks came, they dug holes. They didn’t care at all about the consequences of that. Folks would put pipes in the sand and take the natural gas that would leak into that sand and light it as flares,” Hart said.
Although the piers on Haskell’s Beach had been inactive since the 1990s, state officials say the decades of compiled waste and oil spillage from their prior use continued polluting the California coastline.
“As a kid, my siblings and I would go to these beaches and we would get so laden with tar way back then because of the oil, that my mom would use lighter fluid to clean it off of us before we could go into the house.,” recalled Santa Barbara County District 2 Supervisor Laura Capps. “Toxic chemicals to try and undo the toxic chemicals from the beach. And I am just so hopeful that the future will be free from that.”
“They were broken down, they were smelly, they were just terrible. The State Lands [Commission] was able to pull together the resources financed by the State of California with the support of the community, to plug and abandon the wells and remove those awful, old legacy facilities,” Kounalakis added.
Lt. Gov. Kounalakis says in recent months, the State Lands Commission has also worked to plug 30 of the wells on Platform Holly just off the Goleta coast, minimizing the risks of hydrogen sulfide detriments to the environment.
“California is more committed than ever to a carbon-free energy future, to phasing out the use of fossil fuels in favor of solar, wind and battery storage, and really the energy of the future,” Kounalakis added.
On Wednesday, the State Lands Commission will host a community town hall meeting in the Goleta City Council Chambers, where they will provide an update on the process and timeline of Platform Holly’s decommissioning.
Officials with the State Lands Commission say the pier removal process in Goleta got started last August and wrapped up this past February.
It entailed the removal of more than 4,000 tons of soil, 1,000 tons of concrete, 300 tons of steel, and 100 tons of wood.
