I recently toured a site containing aging oil infrastructure. Atop a peaceful coastal California bluff draped in late-day golden sun stood two oil-storage tanks and one smaller emergency water tank, plus a network of pipes. This is the Ellwood Marine Terminal. For decades, oil drilled from an offshore platform was piped to an onshore facility a couple of miles away, cleaned and processed, then piped to one of these tanks. From here, it was sent back offshore, to be retrieved, 55,000 barrels at a time, by a barge headed to either San Francisco or Long Beach.
It hasn’t been in use since 2012, and the oil platform that served it is being decommissioned, so the 19-acre site is about to be deindustrialized and converted to recreational space. By the time you read this, the tanks should already be gone. By September, the onshore pipes will be removed. Then a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration will restore the area for native species and public use, as they have recently done at an adjacent former golf course. With the ocean at their backs, Cheadle Center staff asked for input from the public, including members of the Chumash Tribe, on creating trails, overlooks and interpretive signage. The full restoration is expected to take five years.
It’s inspiring to see something like the Ellwood Marine Terminal dismantled and repurposed as open space. But some sites are harder to deindustrialize than others. This summer, High Country News staff writer B. “Toastie” Oaster joined a tour of the notorious Hanford Site on the Columbia River in Washington, where plutonium was manufactured during World War II and the Cold War. Given Hanford’s size and the radioactivity of some of its waste, cleanup, remediation and “risk reduction” activities will be ongoing for decades. So far, 680 tons of contaminants have been removed from groundwater and 953 facilities have been demolished. But much more remains. Oaster’s story describes just how much, as well as how the region’s tribes became involved in the cleanup, approaching it as a multigenerational endeavor.
Having Indigenous tribes play a lead role in determining how to heal retired industrial sites ought to be compulsory. Such sites are often located on ancestral lands, so there’s a justice imperative. But also, tribal input on the future of these places will likely benefit the process more than what the colonizer cultures that built such sites can offer. The work that tribes do at places like Hanford can help build a better future for everyone.
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