West Winds

Boat/US Magazine, Nov, 2001 by Tony Gibbs

Among the most familiar sights for boaters in the waters of Southern California are the oil-drilling platforms that cluster a few miles off the coast. By any standard they're visually imposing -- massive, heavily buttressed legs supporting squared-off platforms packed with living and working quarters, crowned by helipads and cranes.

But if what you can see of an oil platform is impressive, what's below the surface is equally dramatic. Those huge legs, and their supporting framework, drop down anywhere from 100 to 1,200 feet below the surface, and their bases are surrounded by 25-foot-high mounds of shells.

Those shells are emblematic of a new coastal controversy whose resolution will affect boaters and fishermen in waters far removed from ours. When the offshore drilling platforms were approved some three decades ago, the oil companies formally agreed to remove them, root and branch, once the oil fields were pumped out. A few years ago, four platforms were in fact dismantled, at a cost of about $10 million a pop. That tab must have been a grim alert to the proprietors of the remaining 27 platforms, many of which are clearly in their last years of production.

But a tide of protest against removing the structures has recently arisen. Its visible proponents aren't so much the oil companies but sport divers and charter fishing interests, who've found that those massive underwater frames provide what may be a significant habitat for sea life -- not only the vast colonies of mussels and other shellfish that attach themselves to the legs but also tens of thousands of free-swimming fish, some of them from scarce or even endangered species.

What these fishermen and divers (enthusiastically backed by the oil companies) have proposed is that the visible platforms themselves be dismantled, but only down to a depth of about 85 feet. The remaining framework, including the foundation -- the hardest and messiest element to remove -- would simply stay in place.

The oil companies have offered to contribute between 35% and 65% of the money they'd save to a fund for the protection and restoration of marine resources. It's a tidy sum, even by government standards -- $300 million to $400 million. And best of all, from the legislature's point of view, is that 95% of the money would go into two state-controlled funds -- a newly created Marine Resources Trust Fund and a California Endowment for Marine Preservation.

Coming out of left field, a bill authorizing the rigs-to-reefs transformation has just passed both California houses and is on the governor's desk as I write.

In the meantime, however, the measure's opposition hasn't given up. It's an unusual coalition -- local legislators whose districts would get only peanuts from the new set-up, just about every heavy-duty marine environmental organization, and the waning but still vocal commercial fishing industry.

The environmentalists maintain that the platforms' bases don't constitute significant environments in the first place. Moreover, the shell mounds beneath them are heavily contaminated with chemicals and metals from years of drilling and ought to be excavated and removed along with the foundations.

The commercial fishermen's complaint is simply that the abandoned frameworks would catch their nets, damaging them and possibly endangering the towing vessels.

One -- this one, anyway -- can't help but notice in the environmentalists' language a frustrated rage that their old enemy, Big Oil, is getting away with something, avoiding a just punishment for making all that money for so many years. And the commercial fishermen's argument seems pretty thin: The oil platforms are surely among the most precisely charted obstacles in the ocean -- indeed, their coordinates are probably in every GPS up and down the coast.

California Governor Gray Davis is famous for keeping his own counsel before deciding whether to sign a bill into law, so what will happen next remains a suspenseful question. But if he does go along with rigs-to-reefs, Americans on every coast may find that supposedly temporary maritime structures have suddenly developed an unlimited half-life.

Tony Gibbs, author of a dozen books and a former editor of The New Yorker and Yachting, also writes for Islands magazine.