The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum’s Zoom event: Detecting and Capping Leaking Oil Wells in Summerland took place on Thursday, June 17, and was a huge success with many virtual attendees! If you weren't able to catch the event, you can now watch our recording of the webinar here. . .

Join us tomorrow, Thursday, June 17, 2021, at 7 p.m. as we come together to tell the story of this victory for the environment at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum’s Zoom event: Detecting and Capping Leaking Oil Wells in Summerland. This Zoom presentation will be led by producer, director, and documentary filmmaker Harry Rabin, the CEO, and founder of On the Wave Productions who worked alongside engineers and divers in the Summerland oil well field. The event will feature panelists who were involved in this environmental success.

A trawler that had been anchored off the Santa Barbara shoreline at Montecito, cut loose during the high winds of the week of May 17, 2021, and began drifting down the coast toward Carpinteria. People called and could get no one to help. Technically, there is a jurisdictional line in the ocean between City and County at the end of East Beach, and this wreckage cut loose on the County side, so no harbor patrol boat could go out after it as it drifted. . .

Thanks to EVERYBODY who responded to our call for help this morning! Volunteers arrived. So did the great workers from MarBorg Industries. All the debris from that big trawler-type vessel that hit the beach at the Padaro-Sandyland area were gathered in little stacks and hauled away in MarBorg trucks. Most of it has been hauled away already, before the big operation starts, to get the boat off the beach. . .

A big trawler-type vessel has hit the beach at the Padaro-Sandyland area. Heal the Ocean and MarBorg Industries have been working on getting it, plus debris/wreckage, out of there – with the final attack on the main hull happening at an upcoming low tide.

WE NEED HELPERS IMMEDIATELY – the boat is currently breaking up in the surf and there is Styrofoam everywhere. MarBorg workers are on-site now gathering up debris from the wreckage, which is now spreading widely down the beach – we need YOU to go to the beach immediately and help the workers by picking up debris and making little piles of debris as close to the parking lot as possible on the beach for the workers to pick up. . .

“What is the West End Master Plan?” asks a Santa Barbara City employee. “Where do I find the Questa Study?” says another. “What is the Questa Study?” asks another.

Does anyone know where I can find the Goleta Potable Reuse Study? The Braemar conceptual sewer plan? Santa Ynez Community Plan?

In recent years, Heal the Ocean has been approached numerous times for help in finding these pieces of information. As many city, county, and state officials have retired, taking their institutional knowledge with them, we have recognized how critical it is to preserve their work and knowledge for future use. As a result, Heal the Ocean has created a new website with a digital research library of these and other documents – important works that need to be preserved and accessed by all. . .

This Earth Day, Thursday, April 22, 2021, at 3pm, join Heal the Ocean for a virtual Downtown Business Spotlight interview hosted by Downtown Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Independent!

The show’s theme, “Environmental Awareness,” will feature Hillary Hauser from Heal the Ocean; Sigrid Wright from the Community Environmental Council; and Deborah Schwartz from Santa Barbara Beautiful. Join us as we dive into questions about what Heal the Ocean does and how you can help local environmental groups do their work.

For more information and to join the conversation via Zoom on Thursday, April 22 at 3pm, please click here.

On Saturday, March 20, 2021, a large banner flew over Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex Saturday morning as a show of support for inmates who have had to endure the COVID-19 pandemic behind bars.

The long banner read "FCC Prisoners You Are Not Forgotten."

Heal the Ocean provided the airplane. Originally, organizers planned to release balloons designed to fly in the sky over the prison in a show of support for inmates who have suffered multiple COVID-19 outbreaks at the prison since March 2020. During those outbreaks, more than 1,000 inmates and staff members at the prison were infected. Four inmates have passed away. . .

In this E-Letter:

• HTO Featured in the Montecito Journal's GIVING LIST

• Saving the San Marcos Foothills

• What are those awful streamers and balloons in Summerland trees?

• How to Report Homeless Encampment Pollution

• Rhapsody in Blue - Get Your New Sticker Here!

An abandoned homeless camp surrounded by trash, bicycle parts, car batteries, flooded tents, and other offal became an eyesore on the “Graveyards” beach in Montecito, at the base of the cliff below the Santa Barbara Cemetery. Heal the Ocean got a call about it from a concerned citizen, on Thursday, January 7, 2020. It took all day Friday to figure out how we could legally do anything about it – one cannot remove a homeless camp in use. . .

On Friday afternoon, November 27, 2020, while many of us were still cleaning up our kitchens from Thanksgiving dinners the night before, the Curtin Barge, under contract to the State Lands Commission to cap the leaking Summerland oil wells, was towed from its protective mooring nearer the Santa Barbara Harbor, back down the coast to Summerland where it anchored to begin the process of capping the second, and final, well – NorthStar. Marie Morrisroe caught this sight from her Montecito balcony as they motored by.

In another great collaboration between Heal the Ocean and MarBorg Industries, all the boat wreckage that has been littering Montecito beaches between East Beach to Hammonds, was cleaned up today, Wednesday, November 11, 2020. The work, funded through Heal the Ocean by the Johnson Ohana Foundation, was performed by a MarBorg crew and heavy equipment at 1:15 p.m. low tide.