October 6, 2021 — A massive oil spill off the Orange County coast that’s fouled beaches and ecologically sensitive wetlands in what officials are calling an environmental catastrophe has renewed calls to ban offshore drilling.
The spill, first reported Saturday morning but perhaps detected the night before, originated from a pipeline running from the Port of Long Beach to an offshore oil platform known as Elly. The failure caused as much as 144,000 gallons of oil to gush into the Catalina Channel.
In the days that followed, the spill has left crude along stretches of sand in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach, killing fish and birds and threatening sensitive marine habitats.
“The ecological and economic damage from this oil spill has the potential to reverberate for generations,” state Sen. Dave Min (D-Irvine) said this week. At a news conference Tuesday, Min called the spill “either a case of negligence or inaction.”
Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times