California’s offshore oil rigs are decades old, and industry resists decommissioning them

LOS ANGELES — Amid a week of horror and heartbreak, outrage and demands for greater accountability, many Californians couldn’t help but question all the other oil platforms that have rusted and churned for decades just a few miles offshore.

Take Platform A, perhaps the most notorious rig of them all: On the morning of Jan. 28, 1969, this looming complex of metal off the Santa Barbara coast had ruptured the seafloor and boiled the sea black. Thousands of birds, drenched in oil, struggled to take flight. Sea otters flailed in the water. The spill became the “environmental shot heard round the world” — galvanizing the nation and forever sealing California’s distaste for offshore drilling.

Now, more than 50 years later, memories may have faded but this platform has not. Platforms A, B and C, along with more than a dozen other rigs, continue to operate — often under questionable oversight and circumstances that would seem shocking to most.

Experts and environmental advocates say this aging infrastructure will likely spark more disasters in the years ahead — as oil companies face an uncertain future, are reluctant to invest in upgrades, and hand off assets to smaller and smaller companies.

While industry officials