California spill came 52 years after historic oil disaster

By CHRISTINA LARSON
AP Science Writer

The weekend oil leak along the Southern California coast happened not far from the site of the catastrophe more than a generation ago that helped give rise to the modern environmental movement itself: the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. That still ranks in the top tier of human-caused disasters in the United States and is the nation’s third-largest oil spill, behind only the 2010 Deepwater Horizon and 1989 Exxon Valdez calamities.