California spill came 52 years after historic oil disaster
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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.