Bolinas sculptor Tom D'Onofrio recalls the moment vividly: he woke up at 6 a.m. on Jan. 19, 1971, and turned his radio to KSAN, the local underground station. Just like any other day.

There he heard announcer Dave McQueen tell of a huge slick of oil heading toward Bolinas.

"I heard that and said, 'Holy sh-t,' and jumped on my horse as it was just getting light," D'Onofrio told The Light this week. "I could smell the oil before I got to the cliff [at Agate Beach].

"I got there and looked down and the beach was covered with oil. It was on the rocks, the waves, the logs. Everything. And I started to cry. I'll never forget that moment."

Shortly after midnight on Jan. 18, more than 28 hours earlier, two gigantic oil tankers collided near the Golden Gate Bridge, spilling more than 800,000 gallons of the thick, gooey black oil into San Francisco Bay. A northern current pushed the slick through the Golden Gate, where it clung to the shores of Bolinas and beaches up and down the central coast.

In the wake of the aggressive cleanup, several large-scale development projects for West Marin got jettisoned. In the town of Bolinas, the public utility district was overhauled, and all future development got frozen out by a strict moratorium on new water hook-ups.

"Here it is 25 years later, and basically all the things we wanted this town to become it's become," D'Onofrio reflected. "This is what we wanted."

The spill itself was spectacular. In the early hours of Jan. 18, the the Arizona Standard, a 10,000-ton Standard Oil tanker, was edging into San Francisco Bay through a shroud of fog. Meanwhile, its sister ship, the Oregon Standard, was rounding Angel Island, aiming out to sea with a hold full of heavy fuel oil bound for British Columbia.

Neither crew was aware of the other until Arizona Capt. Harry Parnell spotted the Oregon off starboard, 200 yards away and closing.

Knowing a collision was inevitable, Parnell ordered his tanker steered to absorb the blow on its bow. At 1:42 a.m., the ships rammed each other a few hundred yards west of the bridge.

Wrenched together in a snarl of metal, the pair spun helplessly as the Bunker-C oil streamed from the Oregon's hull.

"When we came together, it wasn't the tremendous blow you'd expect. In fact, it was rather soft," Parnell said later. "I felt like a cork in a leaking bottle."

The collision ripped open six of the Oregon's 26 fuel oil compartments, dumping 840,000 gallons of oil into the bay - more than half of which ended up on beaches around the Bay Area. The spill killed roughly 20,000 birds and some seven million marine organisms, according to Bay Area researchers.

At the time, he knew, the tide was retreating although it would be coming back in about two hours. D'Onofrio figured there was a short window of time in which the lagoon could be protected, if it could be saved at all.

Drawing on his days at a logging camp in the Adirondacks, D'Onofrio felt that stringing a boom - a row of logs - across the lagoon's narrow mouth might provide a decent barrier, and that hay could be used to soak up oil.

"It was a crude plan, but this was instantaneous thinking," the sculptor said.

He approached neighbor John Armstrong, a boatbuilder with many logs on his property, and persuaded him to help with the boom's construction.

D'Onofrio then drove down to Scowley's, the local cafe and hangout (now site of the Kaleidoscope women's craft collective) to enlist manpower.

By the time the band of volunteers reached the beach, hundreds of residents had converged at the end of Wharf Road to help.

Armstrong backed his truck onto the sand. Then, ignoring the threats shouted from county and state workers standing across the mouth on Seadrift Sandspit, Bolinas residents frantically built the protective boom.

In a thick fog, men and women tugged logs, dug holes, and lugged hay that had arrived from Toby's Feed Barn in Point Reyes Station. A flotilla of small boats gathered to help position the logs.

And the plan worked. The Bolinas boom kept almost all of the oil out of the lagoon. The first, slapdash boom was later augmented by three others, all of which later gave way while the boom built by residents held.

"It was really inspirational," said Clerin Zumwalt, who was then a naturalist at Audubon Canyon Ranch. "I never saw such a spontaneous response to something. People had a feeling they wanted to do something good, and they did it, by golly."

Bolinas resident Greg Hewlett said, "It was an incredible combination of individuals and a goal, and a real caring for what was going on in a place that we really love," he said.

The Bolinas effort drew TV and newspaper coverage from all over the world. Bolinas resident Jerry Burr told The Light in 1981 about being on a beach in France and reading about the oil spill on the front page of the International Herald Tribune.

"I saw the names of all these people I knew," he said, "and when I came back all these ex-burnouts were all frenetic."

In addition to the boom, many came to Bolinas to try to save the birds who were sopping with the thick muck. The College of Marin's Marine Biology Lab became an epicenter for people scrubbing the terrified cormorants, murres, scoters, grebes, and loons.

Unfortunately, life-saving efforts were often futile.

"We saved maybe five out of every 100 birds," Hewlett said. "We tried everything, from corn meal to olive oil to detergent. A lot of it didn't work. This wasn't oil, this was tar."

Lagunitas' Jean Berensmeier, who came to the beach with her son to help clean the birds, was shaken by the futility of the birds' plight.

"There were birds dying right in your hands, and you couldn't do anything about it," she recalled. "That feeling of helplessness was something that will stay with me forever."

All told, more than 6,000 birds received some form of treatment from the spill, although only 230 survived for release.

"This was probably the calmest winter I'd ever seen," D'Onofrio said. "If it had been stormy, nothing we did would have worked."

In other efforts, Scowley's Randy Fontan (known in Bolinas as Captain Spatula) brought 40-gallon cans full of coffee and wheelbarrows full of hamburgers to feed volunteers on the beach.

Truckloads of bread, eggs, and cheese arrived from all over the Bay Area. Strangers came from Mill Valley and other towns with turkeys, soup, and other food.

By noon that day, volunteers were flooding into Bolinas, some bringing food, some shovels, some bringing rags for the birds to nest in.

Meanwhile, a band set up at the end of Wharf Road to boost the the spirits of straining workers. Hay and heavy machinery arrived by the truckload.

"There's no way you can recapture the energy that was going on at the time," Hewlett said. "In those first few days, we pulled some sh-t off that was borderline miraculous."

At night, with the ocean purple and black with long, serpentine stripes of oil, Bolinas residents toiled side-by-side with Standard Oil workers under mercury vapor lights.

Volunteers scrambled down the rocks to inaccessible spots. From overhead, helicopters lowered straw that workers used to soak up oil, and which was then disposed of in 55-gallon drums.

Compared with the exertion of the volunteers, Standard Oil's help on the clean-up seemed almost a distraction.

Jules Mayer, a Standard executive who was the company's team supervisor on the cleanup, said at the time, "We took the approach of finding out who the [volunteers'] leader was, then asking him how we could help give him what he needed."

Bolinas' Hewlett, who worked the phones to coordinate manpower and order equipment, said he and a handful of other Bolinas residents unexpectedly found themselves in positions of power.

Another phonebank volunteer, Russ Riviere, reported then, "We simply decided what we needed, called to get it, and told them to send the bill to Standard Oil. We didn't know what we were doing, but we pretended pretty well."

The cleanup continued for about eight days before slowly subsiding. The effects, however, did not fade so quickly.

Bolinas was already a fairly progressive town; the population included a fair number of Berkeley and San Francisco expatriates. But Hewlett said the enthusiasm from the cleanup effort surged over into local politics.

"After it was over, we realized we had worked together in a way that was really intoxicating," he said.

So Hewlett, Riviere, and a handful of other Bolinas residents got together and formed the Future Studies Group.

"We said, 'This place is going to become to Mill Valley,'" D'Onofrio explained, "and we've got to do something about it. We didn't want to get 10 years down the road and say, 'How the hell did we let this happen?'"

In the process, residents stopped the Kennedy Sewer project, an ambitious plan to link Stinson Beach and Bolinas through one sewer system. Under the plan, sewage would have been released in the ocean, and the larger capacity would have invited development, perhaps adding tens of thousands of people to the population.

Ultimately, the town imposed a moratorium on new water connections, which to this day has effectively blocked any growth.

Hewlett said the political work was a natural result of the cleanup effort: "It's as close to cause and effect as you can get," he said. "The oil spill got the whole community working together, thinking more was possible."

The spirit spread to other West Marin communities, including the San Geronimo Valley, Point Reyes Station, and Stinson Beach.

"The desire of people to get together as a community to do something - that carryover happened here," she said. "We said, 'We can get involved, we can do better, let's do it.'"

Anne Dick of Point Reyes Station, chairwoman of that town's first planning group, said Bolinas' community plan sparked her group to follow suit.

"A little while after Bolinas conceived their plan, a couple [members of Future Studies] came up here and met with me," she said. "They wanted Point Reyes Station to start a community plan.

"They got their plan going, and their plan kicked off our plan."

In short, the clean-up effort sparked a movement toward local control, community involvement, and collective go-to-it-tiveness that is now part and parcel of life in West Marin.

"I really feel, in the end, we made a difference," said Hewlett. "As long as they don't change the name of Volunteer Canyon to Newt Gingrich Canyon, people will remember what we did."