Thursday, October 1, 2026
The federal government’s push to expand offshore oil drilling is back.
The waters off Long Island are not part of the plan, so far. The focus now is areas off California and Florida. With the plan’s recent announcement, Newsday ran a cartoon depicting President Trump declaring, in front of a line of offshore wind turbines: “Wind turbines ruin the view!” Then there was Trump in front of a bunch of offshore oil drilling rigs, saying, “… but oil rigs are beautiful!”
In 1970, doing investigative reporting at the daily Long Island Press, I broke the story of offshore oil drilling proposed off Long Island, which led to writing about the federal plans to drill up and down the Atlantic Coast.
A fisherman out of Montauk told me about seeing a ship east of Long Island similar to those he’d seen searching for oil in the Gulf of Mexico when he was a shrimper there. I telephoned oil company after oil company to inquire about this, and each firmly denied having any interest in looking for petroleum off Long Island.
Then a PR man from Gulf called and said, yes, his company was looking for oil and gas off Long Island — and was involved in a consortium of 32 oil companies, including those that had earlier issued denials.
In 1971 I got onto the first offshore oil-drilling rig set up in the Atlantic, across the border in Canadian waters. Shell Canada invited the Suffolk County Legislature for a visit. There was strong opposition to offshore oil drilling off Long Island, and the Legislature was a leader. It listed my name as part of the delegation.
On the tarmac of the airport in Sydney, Nova Scotia, however, a Shell Canada executive came over to me and said: “You don’t think you’re going to get on this helicopter, Mr. Grossman.”
The legislators intervened, with Legislator John Wehrenberg, of Holbrook, telling the Shell executive, “If Karl isn’t going, we’re not going.”
There was a standoff. The men from Shell Canada huddled — and I got on the chopper. The visit was instructive: It was clear on the rig, with its equipment in preparation for a blowout and an oil spill, that offshore drilling is a dicey proposition.
There were spherical capsules to eject workers in the event of an accident. And a rescue boat went round and round, 24 hours a day. The man from Shell Canada told me, “We treat every foot of hole like a potential disaster.”
He gestured to the Nova Scotia shore and said that peat moss was being stockpiled to try to absorb spilled oil. On Long Island, he said, “You’d use straw.”
In covering the story, I attended many hearings, and traveled down the coast to the Florida Keys, their turquoise waters on the agenda for the drilling. Meanwhile, states, and Congress, took action to block oil drilling in the Atlantic.
Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., of Sag Harbor, co-sponsor of a 1979 state bill, said, “Tourism is a major economic driver for Long Island. We also have a very viable commercial and recreational and fishing industry. The proposal for offshore oil drilling threatens both our economy and our environment.”
Oil spills, then and now, were and still are routine in offshore oil drilling. The largest spill ever was the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it released 3.19 million barrels of oil, impacting 43,300 square miles of ocean, an area roughly the size of Virginia.
“Offshore Drilling 101,” a recent online report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, begins: “Offshore drilling is risky business. It can have devastating impacts on oceans and coastal communities. … Until we stop sacrificing public waters to fossil fuels, we’ll continue to see disastrous oil spills … and the acceleration of our climate crisis.”
Will the Trump administration, with its call to “Drill, baby, drill,” include, once again, waters off Long Island and the Atlantic coast?
Karl Grossman has been an investigative reporter in a variety of media for more than 50 years. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY Old Westbury.
