PORT ARANSAS — Tony Amos has seen this disaster before.

The explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. The runaway well. The blowout preventer that didn't prevent the blowout. The ever-growing estimates of the spew. The high-tech attempts to cap it, the failures, the dispersants. The months of waiting. The blackened beaches and oiled birds.

More than 30 years later, the Ixtoc I blowout still makes the white-bearded oceanographer furious. Ixtoc, he notes, was the biggest oil disaster the world had ever seen. After the platform exploded June 3, 1979, in Mexico's Bay of Campeche, the 2-mile-deep well spewed for an astounding 293 days, pouring an estimated 140 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.

Amos is 72, but he remembers Ixtoc sharply. The year before, he had begun making detailed surveys of a 7-mile stretch of Mustang Island beach. Every other day, he recorded each bird, each patch of seaweed. On the day Ixtoc oil coated that beach, his notebook shows, he cried.

To me, Amos' anger and sadness make sense: But somehow, in the U.S., that anger and sadness didn't hit most people. Instead of serving as a warning of what could happen in the Gulf, Ixtoc became a footnote, a factoid. "Have you been watching the Senate's BP hearings?" Amos asked me. "Somebody just brought it up. 'Eh-eh-eh-ex...toc,' the guy said. Couldn't even remember the name."

That forgetting infuriated me, too. In retrospect, Ixtoc seems like a giant, blinking warning sign: This could happen again, closer to home.

I wanted to know: How did we miss that? Why are we still using technology much like the attempts that failed at Ixtoc? Why didn't we insist on a real response plan - one able to handle a Gulf-size crisis? Did we forget a disaster that big was possible? Did we learn nothing?

Fading memories

I came to the Texas coast expecting to find lots of people like Amos - people as mad as I was, people who bore old psychic scars, people who still shivered to remember the 150 miles of Texas beaches coated with oil.

But that wasn't the reaction I got. Except for scientists like Amos, when I asked Port Aransas' old-timers about Ixtoc, most shrugged and struggled to remember something.

Retired deep-sea fishing guides volunteered that they'd steer their boats close to oil slicks; some believed the fish hid under them. A real estate agent said the oil hurt sales that summer. A veteran laughed about the nickname "Tar Baby" he got after camping on the beach.

Only one question reliably made people light up. I learned to ask what they had used to remove the black, carpet-wrecking tar balls from their feet and shoes.

Baby wipes, they'd say, laughing. Or baby oil.

WD-40. Gojo. Gasoline.

Some of Port Aransas' old-timers are furious about the BP spill off Louisiana's coast. But they hardly ever think of Ixtoc - the spill that hit their own coast and affected their own livelihoods. The spill that could have served as a warning.

It's as if their memories have been wiped as clean as their feet.

Amid the energy crisis

Along the coast - in Corpus, in Padre, in Port Aransas - I kept asking people how Ixtoc was different from the BP spill.

Sometimes they talked about the media now, the way the 24-hour news cycle now begs to be filled.

Other times, they talked about the '79 oil crisis. Gas was expensive, lines were long and everyone hated OPEC. Miles of oil floating on the water seemed less a threat than a waste: "Runaway Mexican well spews $250 million into the Gulf," as a New York Times headline put it. Chirped Time: "On the bright side, the size of the latest blowout implies a major new find by Pemex."

Geography mattered, too. Mexico seemed a world away from the U.S.; no one believed that what happened there could happen here. Only a few American reporters or scientists examined the Bay of Campeche coast at the time, and the U.S. didn't fund follow-up studies - not even for the oiled mangrove swamps similar to Louisiana's marshes.

Nor did it help that in the U.S., Ixtoc's oil washed up only in Texas - hardly a hotbed of environmentalism, and happy to rub its new oil money in the rest of the country's face. Oil on Texas beaches? California and New York weren't crying.

But Port Aransas wasn't getting rich. Most of the little town's businesses were scraping by; Ixtoc threatened their existence.

Denial was the town's favorite coping mechanism. Even as oil coated the beaches, people complained that reporters were making a big deal out of nothing.

"We have tar balls here all the time," the mayor told the Houston Chronicle.

'Looking for a bright side'

At a time when the barrier islands carried a continuous ribbon of oil, 10 to 15 feet wide - a one-lane road of tar at the tideline - the weekly Port Aransas South Jetty newspaper reported that "local interests, still looking for a bright side, are noting that offshore fishing is still producing pretty good catches, the beaches above the high tide line are still attractive, with some cleaner spots attracting swimmers, and Texas shrimp are still being landed outside the area of the drifting patches of oil." A vacation paradise!

Mercifully, the oil didn't make it past the hardy barrier islands and into the fragile bays.

After the current shifted and stopped carrying the goo to Texas, crews scraped the tourist beaches clean. In September, tides kicked up by Hurricane Frederic washed much of the oil back into the ocean, and sand covered the tar mats dried on the beaches.

The well still hadn't been capped, and tar balls would plague our beaches for years. But almost immediately, the state tourist agency launched a publicity campaign: "The coast is clear."

It should have seemed ludicrous. But really, it wasn't ludicrous at all. The agency was simply asking Americans to do what most of them had wanted to do all along: To forget Ixtoc, even while it was happening.

lisa.gray@chron.com