Offshore drilling urged to stop after mass oil spill off California

Nanette D. Barragan, Congresswoman from California's 44th Congressional District, and Mike Levin, ongressman from the state's 49th Congressional District, made the remarks on Monday after inspecting the incident, reports Xinhua news agency.

"The devastation of the oil spill continues to spread off the coast of Orange County. @RepMikeLevin and I are joining the @USCG on an overflight to view the impacts of the damage," Barragan tweeted on Monday afternoon, noting that "we must end offshore oil drilling".

"This disaster is exactly why I'm leading the bill in Congress that would end all new offshore drilling along our Southern California coast. We need to get this done," Levin also said in a tweet. "If you agree it's time to pass my American Coasts and Oceans Protection Act."

The spill, first reported on October 2, originated from a pipeline running from the Port of Long Beach to an offshore oil platform known as Elly. 

The failure till Monday caused roughly 126,000 gallons of oil to gush into the ocean, creating a slick spanning about 8,320 acres.

The spill has left oil along long stretches of sand in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach, killing fish and birds and threatening wetlands.

Oil from the spill, called by local officials as an environmental catastrophe, was moving south toward the sensitive coves around Laguna Beach on Monday.

The two Congress members who called on an end to offshore drilling are Democrats, while Michelle Steel, the representative from the 48th Congressional District, is a Republican. 

She sent a letter to Democratic President Joe Biden requesting a major disaster declaration for Orange County, which would free up federal funds to help with the clean-up efforts.

In Washington D.C., many California Democrats called for limiting or halting offshore drilling in the wake of the incident, as the overall impact is hard to assess at this point.

"The oil spill off the coast of Orange County reiterates the perils of offshore drilling," Senator Dianne Feinstein said in a statement. 

"We've seen time and time again how damaging offshore oil spills are to our coastal ecosystems as well as to our economy. We have the power to prevent future spills - that's why I'm committed to ending offshore oil drilling," Alex Padilla, another senator from the Golden State, wrote.

Offshore drilling was restricted in California after a devastating 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, 150 km north of the Los Angeles downtown, that spewed an estimated 3 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean, creating a slick 35 miles long along California's coast and killing thousands of birds, fish and sea mammals.

The Santa Barbara spill was the worst in the nation's history - until 20 years later, when the Exxon Valdez dumped 11 million gallons of crude off the coast of Alaska on March 24, 1989.

In Orange County, the latest mass oil spill incidents occurred on February 7, 1990, when the oil tanker American Trader ran over its anchor in shallow water just about 2,200 meters off Huntington Beach. It spilled nearly 417,000 gallons of crude, killing many fish and about 3,400 birds.

Oil production off California's coast declined sharply since its peak in the 1990s, after isome strict environmental rules were passed, such as the the California Coastal Sanctuary Act passed by the state legislature in 1994, which prohibited the state from entering into any new leases within state tidelands.

In 2017, the California Senate passed a resolution opposing new oil or gas drilling in federal waters located offshore California.

In 2019, when the former Donald Trump administration planned to lease sales along the country's coast and vastly expand offshore oil drilling from coast to coast, California passed a law prohibiting new leases for new construction of oil and gas-related infrastructure, such as pipelines, within state waters if the federal government authorises any new offshore oil leases.

California Governor Gavin Newsom said he would like to end oil drilling in the state by 2045.