Coastal Areas

Re "Gulf oil complex is spared the brunt," Sept. 2 One lesson from recent storms in the Gulf of Mexico should be that the protection of coastal residents and our domestic energy supply is tied to healthy wetlands and coastal areas. Because of eroding wetlands, moderate storms retain their strength, pounding infrastructure and communities and causing tremendous stress to an intricate system that supplies Americans with energy and water-borne goods. The network of refineries that line the Mississippi River, the pipelines for fuel and the transportation routes for commerce to 31 states are all vulnerable.

A divided Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday in support of offshore drilling, after an impassioned daylong hearing in which this year's record gas prices trumped the memory of a disastrous oil spill. By a 3-2 vote that broke along geographic lines, supervisors agreed to send a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urging him to change state policy and "allow expanded oil exploration and extraction" off the county's coast. Representatives of the liberal coast lost out to their more conservative inland colleagues in the symbolic action, playing out tensions that have long plagued a region better known for its broad beaches and celebrity residents than its oil and agricultural fields.

Admittedly I'm biased on offshore drilling. I was born in Santa Barbara, grew up in Ojai and spent many a weekend on the beach. But that didn't make me an anti-drilling fanatic. Hardly. I was around lots of oil rigs -- onshore, offshore and some near the beach. On some beaches around Santa Barbara, you could feel the oozing tar between your toes -- and that was long before a Union Oil platform five miles offshore spilled crud all over 20 miles of coast in 1969. For centuries, the tar naturally had seeped up through the sand, providing the native Chumash with caulking for their canoes.

West Coast governors urged the federal government Tuesday to keep new oil drilling rigs out of their waters and to spend more money on programs to restore the health of the Pacific Ocean. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, joined with Democratic Govs. Ted Kulongoski of Oregon and Chris Gregoire of Washington to reaffirm their opposition to opening undersea oil fields to new drilling, as part of an elaborate action plan for preserving coastal waters.

From the earliest days of exploration, mariners in Chile's cool southern waters marveled at the abundance of whales. A Jesuit naturalist wrote of the sea "boiling" with the spouts of the leviathans. Among 19th century Nantucket boatmen, the island of Mocha was notorious as the stamping grounds of "Mocha Dick," an ill-tempered sperm whale riddled with harpoons.

High surf that was expected to pound Southern California with waves as high as 28 feet fizzled as the day wore on Monday, leaving surfers disappointed by less-than-epic conditions. But authorities warned that rough seas still made fishing from jetties dangerous. "Swells get hyped up a lot on the Internet. It was supposed to be 15 feet here today," said surfer Josh Fuller, 25, of Newport Beach, surveying breaks that were less than a third that size.

A federal judge in Los Angeles on Monday rejected the Bush administration's attempt to exempt Navy sonar training from key environmental laws, saying that there's no real emergency to justify overruling court-ordered protections for whales and dolphins. U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper also suggested that President Bush's effort to maneuver around an earlier federal court order was "constitutionally suspect," although she made no ruling on that issue.

A sonar technician listening through his headset caught the trail of an "enemy" submarine just before a line of warships cruised through waters between Santa Catalina and San Clemente islands. The whooshing sound of bubbles created by the submarine's propeller had been picked up by passive acoustic monitoring, made famous in the movie "The Hunt for Red October."