Largest Accidental Oil Spill

Date: March 15, 1910 • Location: South Taft, United States

Prospectors drilled into a pressurized deposit within the Midway-Sunset Oil Field in California, resulting in the largest accidental oil spill in history, which eventually released 9 million barrels (1.4 million m3) of crude oil over 18 months.

The Midway-Sunset Oil Field is a large oil field in Kern County, San Joaquin Valley, California in the United States. It is the largest known oilfield in California and also the largest oil field in the country by total oil in place, though Alaska's Prudhoe Bay Oil Field and the East Texas Oil Field have larger total production values of over 13 billion barrels and 5.4 billion barrels respectively compared to Midway-Sunset which has produced nearly 4 billion barrels.