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Two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese submarine shot a torpedo at an American oil tanker just off the California coast, sinking the ship and sending three million gallons of crude to the ocean bottom.

All 38 people on board were rescued in what remains an overlooked chapter of World War II — it was one of several attacks by Japanese and German forces on the US mainland during the war.

The SS Montebello has sat mostly intact 275 meters below the surface with the oil remarkably still on board after seven decades. A mission to see how much of the oil remains in the hold of the 135-meter ship launches this week to help officials determine how to prevent the crude from leaking and marring the celebrated central California coastline.

“Eventually, something has to be done,” said Andrew Hughan, a spokesman with California Fish and Game. “If three million gallons of oil made its way to beaches ... it would be a disaster.”

Divers along with a remotely-operated underwater vehicle will begin their assessment today and take samples, a process that is expected to take as many as 12 days. The vehicle will drill and later seal a 2.5-centimeter diameter hole into some of the tanks to take samples that will be analyzed by scientists.

While it’s possible the oil leaked out over the past decades, officials say it’s likely crude remains in the hull. By this point, the oil is so old that it likely has the consistency of peanut butter, US Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers said.

“No one knows what 70-year-old oil does,” he said. “It’s 40 degrees [4.5 Celsius] down there. Is it going to rise to the surface, warm up and liquefy or it is going to be a rock?”

The Montebello set out from Port San Luis, California, on Dec. 22, 1941, bound for a refinery in Canada with fresh crude.

Crew member Richard Quincy said it was the second such trip they had taken and had been warned that Japanese submarines were in the area. The torpedo hit the ship’s bow, which cracked off when the Montebello hit the ocean floor.

Quincy, a 92-year-old former merchant mariner now living in Danville, is the last remaining survivor from the sinking about 10 kilometers off the coast of Cambria. The Montebello, meanwhile, has been sitting upright ever since. Murky pictures from previous dives show a ship partially covered in a thick coat of barnacles, starfish and marine debris.

Few knew about the Montebello’s fate even immediately after it sank. Fearing a mass panic that the Japanese had gotten so close to shore, the government confiscated newspaper reports about the sinking at the time and did not publicly disclose the event even into the Cold War, Eggers said.

It wasn’t until 2009 that state Republican Sen. Sam Blakeslee learned about the potential environmental disaster from a local newspaper report about the Montebello, news that eventually prompted him to help assemble a team of federal and state officials and scientists to investigate the situation. The effort will cost $2.3 million, money that will come out of a fund that oil companies pay into for such measures.

Officials worry a potential spill from the Montebello could eclipse the Santa Barbara oil platform blowout that coated kilometers of coastline in 1969, washing ashore the bodies of dolphins and seals.

Another ship that sank in 1953 near San Francisco called the SS Jacob Luckenbach slowly leaked some of the 475,000 gallons of oil the freighter was carrying, fouling the coast for decades. The Coast Guard spent $20 million to remove oil from the ship and seal it from future leaks, which had already killed tens of thousands of sea birds.

Associated Press