

Hay Was Used Successfully On The
1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill
The Two American Farmers Are Right - All Available Hay Should
Begin To Move To The Gulf Immediately

By Jeff Rense
The two wise American farmers who presented their hay solution to dealing with the massive, burgeoning Gulf of Mexico oil slick are right on the money.
It's doubtful they remember, but the same technique was used in the historic Santa Barbara Channel oil spill.
On January 28, 1969, there was a blowout at an offshore oil rig, Platform A, several miles off the coast of the city of Santa Barbara in the Santa Barbara Channel.
The spill galvanized national and world attention to the potential nightmare and dangers of offshore drilling...
Some of the efforts to contain small parts of the oil slick with booms kept it relatively confined...
The loss of wildlife was considerable...
Some dispersants were used but the best technique turned out to be hay...
The hay, endless of bales of it, were trucked into Santa Barbara and driven out onto the Stearns Wharf pier where it was loaded onto a small fleet of oil service boats, volunteer vessels and a few barges.
The smaller boats cruised through the oil while men with pitchforks tossed hay from the decks of the boats down onto the oil-covered water. A couple of the larger oil boats had big blowers which were used to shoot streams of hay out over a much wider area of the water around the boat. However, because no one was prepared for the disaster, much of the work was done by hand...
The hay DID absorb and stick to the oil.. and as the gooey black masses floated ashore, volunteers of all ages scooped up the clumps from the surf and pulled and dragged them ashore. Scenes similar to these will likely be repeated in many areas of the Gulf Coast over the coming weeks and months...
On the beaches, the oil that had already washed ashore, and was coming in with each wave, was covered with hay by hundreds of workers.
In the end, the oil-soaked hay was then scraped up by heavy equipment, piled up and finally hauled away in dump trucks...
So, I say 'Bravo!' to the two American farmers and let's
get that hay moving to the Gulf NOW. -Jeff Rense

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