Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Summerland, CA

Summerland is a census-designated place on the Santa Barbara County coast, built on coastal bluffs along U.S. Route 101 between Montecito and Carpinteria, with only about 1.4 square miles of land.

Summerland was founded in 1883 by spiritualist and real estate speculator H. L. Williams, who in 1888 subdivided his ocean-facing hill into tiny 25-by-60-foot lots that he sold for $25 each to fellow Spiritualists.

Summerland's early séances, held in its Spiritualist church and séance room, earned the town the nickname "Spookville"; the séance room itself was demolished when Highway 101 was put through in the 1950s.

Long before the oil era, the Chumash people used tar from Summerland's natural oil seeps to seal their ocean-going plank canoes, called tomols.

In the 1890s the Summerland Oil Field boomed, and the world's first offshore oil well, drilled into the seafloor from a pier, was sunk at Summerland in 1896.

At the height of the boom hundreds of wooden oil derricks crowded Summerland's beaches and piers, and the last oil was pumped from its nearshore field in 1940.

In January 1969, a blowout at the Dos Cuadras oil field about five miles off Summerland caused the Santa Barbara oil spill, a disaster that became a formative event for the modern environmental movement.

The founder's own house in Summerland later became the town's landmark Big Yellow House restaurant.

Summerland's population was 1,222 at the 2020 census, down from 1,448 in 2010, living in 587 households with a small average size of 2.08 people.

Summerland is an affluent enclave with a median age of 52.9 years and an estimated median household income of about $133,000 in 2023, and it enjoys a warm-summer Mediterranean climate.