Overview

SUPERANNO Nestled between the Sierra Madre Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the self-described funky little community of Avila Beach had an ominous neighbor lurking over, and under, the town and its sand, soil, homes, and businesses.

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9781931868761

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In a classic and, unfortunately by now, familiar tale of big-business greed versus small-town pride, Pulitzer Prize-nominee Wolcott presents a balanced expose of one company's arrogant response to an ecological and economic disaster and what one town and one man accomplished in the face of overwhelming odds. - Booklist; Barbara Wolcott recounts a chain of events that began as a jogger's effort to spruce up the local stretch of shore and nearly turned into a federal case. - Mechanical Engineering, August, 2003; This smart, small-town page-turner goes to the guts of what is right and wrong about America today. Barbara Walcott has written a riveting story about taking our country back from the people who are ruining it, and her tale is an ominous warning about how lasting the damage of an unregulated industry can be. - Tim Palmer, author of Pacific High: Adventures in the Coast Ranges from Baja to Alaska and The Heart of America; In this true story of the toxic pollution, corporate intransigence, and the battle to save the soul of the tiny, idyllic California coastal town of Avila Beach, Barbara Wolcott captures the anger, hopelessness, and eventual triumph of the town and its residents and their struggle with Unocal. Ms. Wolcott tells the human story of a hundred years of oil operations and its devastating impact on the fiber and nature of the town and its 350 residents. While the devastation was much smaller in scale than Love Canal or Times Beach, the lives of the residents were no less affected. Ms. Wolcott's narrative evokes the emotional rollercoaster ride through the eyes of the people who were there and who struggled for recovery. - Ken Alex, Deputy Attorney General, California

Author Information

Barbara Wolcott is an award-winning freelance journalist whose work has appeared in a wide variety of national and international periodicals, journals and books, including the Los Angeles Times Magazine, San Diego Family Magazine, Arizona Wildlife, and Civil Engineering News. She was nominated for a 2002 Pulitzer Prize and has won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the National Newspaper Association. Barbara Wolcott holds a B.A. degree in Communications from California State University-Fullerton. She lives in San Luis Obispo, California, fifteen miles from Avila Beach.

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