Summerland Legacy Well Leakage Testimony
Transcript of Testimony Summary
Gil Krabe: [...] I’m a retired commercial fisherman. I’ve been fishing these waters, locally and the Islands for 25 years, and I’ve lived in Summerland for 35 years [...] I’ve had first-hand experiences with the tar, the odors [...] I can also attest to the fact that in the last 2 years… the problem of the tar when I moved there it was minimal, you wouldn’t even care. You know… you would get a little bit of tar every once in a while, now you get it, in the Summer, large quantities on the clothing [...] I went there with my grandson this last Summer and I said ‘I have to leave the beach, I’m sorry. You guy, go ahead and have fun’ because it was getting to my lungs. You know, that feeling when you get too much of a... like lighter fluid or anything, or if you smoke, maybe, I don’t, but maybe. At any rate, the problem has become dramatically worst this last year. I’ve taken photographs, so slick is going out as far as a quarter of a mile in the early morning, when you can see the sheen. And most of it seems to be coming from the west part of the beach, where the low tide in the Summer, this stuff oozes several square yards of a pool of oil [...] It is more likely that it is from wells because if it were from wells, you could expect it to get worst. With the seeps, they come and go, they come and go, they’re more… I’m not an expert but this is my observation [...]
Robert Jones: [...] The people up there in Sacramento and in Washington want to drill oil so they’re gonna say, in essence, when you send that letter to them ‘Hey, this is a good place to start, they got oil leaking all over the place. And we got oil wells just beautifully ready to go’. So, this is suicide, what you’re doing right now is suicide. You don’t even realize it [...]
Leslie Westbrook: [...] We’ve always had the tar seepage like many beaches have. But about 9 months ago is when I first started noticing the oil, there were the slicks and the smell, and when the waves would break, there would be this beautiful bronze foam that would appear, and we knew that something was wrong [...] Anyway, I have some photographs that were taken by Alison Jones, who is a former resident, of her feet just walking on the beach covered with the oil slick [...]
Blair Whitney: [...] This an issue dear to my heart. I have grown up in Montecito and swam the Summerland beach all my life. Now, I take my children there, my 4-year-old boy and my 7-year-old daughter, and we play in the park, in the nice Lookout Park there, County Park (thanks for providing that to us), and we go down the trail to the beach. And the last few times, I’ve had to pull them away from the water and the beach near the water because, as you have seen from these photos, and if you just go down there during low tide, it’s horrible now [...]