The sun broke through the May gray over Refugio State Beach Sunday morning, greeting its weekend campers as they were just waking up — and the nearly 100 people gathered there to commemorate the 11th anniversary of the 2015 Refugio Oil Spill.
Young and old, friends and strangers, surfers paddled out together with smiles as if they were headed out on a group surf session.
While the surfing tradition of “paddling out” is typically a somber event, meant to honor someone in the surf community who passed away, Sunday’s event carried a more urgent meaning.
Stopping at 150 feet from shore, they formed a wide circle, collectively splashing water into the air around a man holding a sign that read “DRILLING IS KILLING.”
The paddle out, organized by the Surfrider Foundation, was also a protest against the restart of the Sable Oil pipeline.
“We’re here to commemorate what happened 11 years ago, but this is still happening,” said Alex Katz, executive director of the Environmental Defense Center, detailing various local oil spills since then. “As we know, this is, for the industry, just the cost of doing business…But it’s not a cost that we want to pay.”
The anniversary comes at a time when President Donald Trump has ordered the restart of the pipeline system that caused the rupture in 2015 when it was owned by Plains All American Pipeline. Now, it is owned by Sable Offshore Corp.
The order has sparked a legal back-and-forth between the state and federal government about who has jurisdiction over the pipeline.
“Surfrider was really disappointed by the hasty restart of the Sable pipeline,” Bill Hickman, Surfrider Foundation’s senior Central Coast regional manager, told the News-Press. “Californians in general are opposed to offshore oil drilling. The majority of Californians don’t want it off of our coast. It’s the most dangerous type of drilling with spills that can impact wildlife and coastal tourism.”
Speakers from the Surfrider Foundation and its UCSB chapter, Patagonia, Environmental Defense Center and Business Alliance for Protecting the Pacific Coast addressed the crowd before they ventured into the water.
Among them was Zach Plopper, Surfrider’s environmental director, who recently went to D.C. to meet with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
“The federal administration any day now is going to be dropping a plan to drill across our entire Southern California coastline,” Plopper said. “And that puts the Santa Barbara Channel in the crosshairs for new rigs and new spills. But not if we have anything to do with it.”
The commemoration served as a timely backdrop for what Sunday’s attendees fear could happen again with the restart of the Sable pipeline.
Kimberly Pinkson recounted the 2015 disaster to the News-Press with tears in her eyes. She recalled explaining to her children, who were nine, 11 and 13 at the time, why the disaster happened and why animals were suffering.
She believes it was a transformative event for her family.
“I think that was part of why they’re all…now working toward a sustainable environment,” Pinkson said.
She hopes that increased awareness about Sable’s efforts makes people realize that “we’re part of this interconnected web of life.”
“The ocean health is integrally connected to the air health, and the food we eat, and the water our children drink,” Pinkson said.
Similarly, Ashley Blacow, the field campaign manager for Oceana, vividly remembers seeing Refugio State Beach just a week after the spill. A graduate of UCSB, she returned to document the response efforts to the disaster.
“My first thought on coming back was… this is not what the area looked like when I left,” Blacow told the News-Press. She remembered the air smelling noxious and seeing stacks of plastic bags filled with oil collected from the spill.
As she recounted her memories to the News-Press, she urged leaders to recognize what another oil spill would do.
“The economic and environmental and human health costs of another spill would be far greater than any perceived benefit,” Blacow said.
