Oil Drilling Controversy

The Times is to be commended for its two-part series by Bill Boyarsky and Ted Vollmer (Metro, Sept. 18, 19) on the decades-long beach oil drilling controversy. It’s critically important, considering the deception characterizing the Occidental-funded Proposition P, that the voters know which initiative is which. Here’s why:

The oil companies keep singing their safety songs when with timeworn predictability disasters continue to make the news.

On Sept. 23 there was another North Sea oil rig fire. A few weeks ago it was a burning oil well near Fillmore and a 60,000 gallon oil leak from a broken pipe on Ventura Boulevard in Encino. Earlier this summer, it was a Mobil Oil refinery blast in Torrance, as well as Oxy’s own oil rig that exploded and killed over 160 people in the North Sea.

As if that weren’t enough, oil companies in general are constantly in the news, and the news is seldom good. Here’s Shell Oil Co. paying $66,900 (a slap on the wrist) for discharging illegal levels of sulfur dioxide from its Carson refinery, and Union Oil found guilty of 74 violations of clean water laws for refinery discharges--both this summer. Voting for oil spells voting for trouble, in my book.

The Occidental drilling project is not in the water (yet) or on the beach, but it’s at the beach, a few yards from the surf, in spite of misleading Oxy ads to the contrary. For that reason it’s incredible to me that it was ever considered in the first place, but now that the public is becoming painfully aware of what is happening to planet Earth, it’s obscene.

JAN HAAS

Pacific Palisades