I'm doing a report on oil spills. There's a lot of information about oil spills on this website and on our Incident News website . We've made a list of some of the things you can find . A. Regulations and laws enacted in the United States during the past 10 years or so have greatly improved prevention of oil spills. Not all oil spill prevention focuses on technology issues.
Human factors play a very important role in spill prevention.
Examples would be things like well blowouts, pipeline breaks, ship collisions or groundings, overfilling of gas tanks and bilge pumping from ships, leaking underground storage tanks, and oil-contaminated water runoff from streets and parking lots during rain storms. Apart from oil spills caused by human actions, oil also is released into the environment from natural oil seeps in the ocean bottom. One of the best-known areas where this happens is Coal Oil Point along the California Coast near Santa Barbara. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of crude oil is released naturally from the ocean bottom every day just a few miles offshore from this beach. Faster currents and winds can make oil spread faster.