Hands Across the Sand Participants Recall Earlier Battle

Roughly two hundred people gathered at Big River Beach on Saturday to express opposition to offshore oil drilling and support for a clean-energy future, with many recalling the battle against the Reagan administration's effort to open up California's outer continental shelf to resource extraction in the 1980s.

Nearly forty years ago, the Department of the Interior published a 1,200 page provisional impact report for Lease Sale 91 that identified sites for 22 oil platforms, estimated the number of helicopters that would be flying in and out of Little River Airport, and predicted oil spills.

The community turned out en masse for a public hearing — 212 people spoke, sang, and read poetry in Eagles Hall before a crowd of 2,500 gathered in the hall and outside. The hearing lasted day and night – with the New York Times pegging it at 24.5 hours — before the Department of Interior called a halt to the proceedings. It was the largest public hearing in the history of California, organizers later claimed.

"It breaks my heart that we have to do this again," Mary Rose Kaczorowski told the Fort Bragg City Council on September 14, when the council voted to send a letter to the California Attorney General and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration opposing offshore drilling or exploration off the California Coast as well as undersea mining.

Lease Sale 91 was never held. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush deferred leasing in the Sale 91 area off northern California until after 2000 and withdrew roughly 99% of the California coast from leasing consideration. President Clinton extended the moratorium to 2012 in 1998.