Winds Aid Effort to Keep Oil From Hitting Coastline : Environment: Two-mile-long slick from tanker spill threatens Orange County beaches and prime wildlife habitats. Cleanup work focuses on scooping up crude.

Winds kept a two-mile-long slick of Alaskan crude oil from washing ashore Thursday, raising hopes that the 300,000-gallon spill--the worst in Southern California in two decades--can be cleaned up before seriously damaging a prized wildlife sancutary and miles of prime Orange County shoreline, authorities said.

“We have been extremely lucky,” said Peter Bontadelli, director of the state Department of Fish and Game. “The good weather and offshore breezes have saved us thus far. The oil has not hit the beaches.”

As scores of anxious environmentalists, local officials and state experts monitored its movement, the purplish slick--about 2 miles long and 4 miles wide--drifted several miles off Huntington Beach.

Officials said it was too large to encircle with a boom, so clean up efforts focused on scooping up the light crude from the damaged tanker, American Trader.

Federal officials had initially ruled out using chemical dispersants because of their toxic nature. But Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard was seeking permission from the U.S Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Fish and Game to employ dispersants to break up the slick.

Investigators zeroed in on one of the ship’s anchors as the apparent cause of the 7,000-barrel spill late Wednesday afternoon in relatively shallow coastal waters. The 21-year-old tanker attempted to moor offshore when the portside anchor apparently punctured the single-hulled vessel, the ship’s owner said.

Thousands of gallons of oil poured through a 3-foot gash before emergency teams halted the leak early Thursday. The tanker, in a routine maneuver, was preparing to unload its cargo of crude through underwater pipelines leading to a Santa Fe Springs refinery.

The anchor theory was supported by Coast Guard officials. “It’s very likely the anchor,” said Chief Warrant Officer Dan Dewell. “Our investigators have have seen the damage to the anchor.” Another Coast Guard officer said: “The anchor is now bent like a banana.”

Owners of the tanker, American Trading Transportation Co. of New York, deployed divers to asess the extent of damage to the ship.

Coast Guard Commandant Paul A. Yost, Jr., who flew to the scene from Washington on Thursday, said there is a good chance that virtually all of the spilled oil will be removed before it can wash ashore if the weather holds. “I can’t tell you what percentage will come ashore, but we hope none,” Yost told reporters gathered near the historic Huntington Beach pier.

A stream of local and state politicans descended on Huntington Beach Thursday, staging a series of press conferences to voice support for clean up efforts and raise questions about oil drilling and tanker movement in Southern California coastal waters.

“I hope this oil spill sends a strong message to Sacramento and Washington,” Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy said at a morning press conference on the beach overlooking the spill. “It was just pure dumb luck we didn’t have a tragedy. We shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security.”

In Washington, Secretary of Transportation Samuel K. Skinner said he would meet with President Bush to brief him on the incident, adding that the oil company and owners of the tanker expressed their “commitment to me” to help in cleaning up the oil.

As the spill clean-up moved into its second day, protests from offshore oil drilling opponents grew.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization, said little comfort could be taken in the fact that the spill had remained offshore or that clean up operations were under way.

“Even though the flow of oil has been stopped, the ability of the oil industry and the government to clean up the 300,000 gallons that were spilled into the Pacific Ocean is pathetic,” the NRDC said in a statement.

Lynne Edgerton, with the NRDC’s Los Angeles office, said, “The spreading slick from the impaled American Trader presents an imminent threat to the ecologically important wetlands of Bolsa Chica, Anaheim Bay, and Upper Newport, some of the healthiest wetlands left in Southern California.”

Despite the warnings, officials said that so far the environmental impact has been remarkably minimal from the spill, the worst since the catastrophic 1969 Santa Barbara spill when 3.2 million gallons of crude fouled beaches for months and killed thousands of shore birds.

“We got lucky, it could have been a lot worse,” said biologist Victor Leipzig, executive director of the Bolsa Chica Conservancy, a grassroots environmental group.

Huntington Beach officials, who declared a state of emergency and planned to meet Thursday night to map out clean up stratgies should the oil wash ashore, kept their fingers crossed that their shoreline would be spared major damage.

“We’ve been dodging bullets for 24 hours,” City Councilman Jim Silva said. “This is one of the most popular beaches in California. It would be a shame if we lost it.”

About a dozen oil-coated birds were rescued Thursday by volunteers and biologists, who set up a command post and wildlife treatment center on the sand south of the Huntington pier. In all, 25 oil-covered birds have reportedly been recovered, of which eight have died.

Fear persisted, however, that the oil would wreck environmental havoc if and when it reaches shore.

“Clearly if the wind and currents shift and it starts moving in, we’re going to have what we always said--significant shoreline impacts,” said Brian Baird, an oil spill expert with the California Coastal Commission.

Fish and game chief Bontadelli said that if the oil hits the Bolsa Chica wetlands, upper Newport Harbor and the mouth of the Santa Ana River it will take 2 1/2 years for the ecosystem to recover. The Bolsa Chica wetlands, the focus of intense battles between environmentalists and develoeprs, is home to dozens of bird species including the Light-footed Clapper Rails and Lest terns, both endangered species.

“The wetlands are the key to all marine life as well as shore birds and wintering water fowl,” Bontadelli said.

Meanwhile, British Petroleum confirmed Thursday that the spilled oil was Alaskan North Slope oil, the same oil that bled from the Exxon Valdez last March.

However, California’s warmer climate may cause the oil to evaporate sooner than it did in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, as well as appear lighter in color.

“With warmer water temperatures, the (more volatile components of the oil) would (evaporate) quicker,” said Charles Webster, BP’s manager of crisis management.

“As far as the persistence of what’s left, it’s probably not a great deal different (from Valdez) except it might remain more liquid than it would if it were in an extremely cold climate,” Webster said.

A federal emergency response team considered attempting to clean up the oil by using chemical dispersants or setting the oil slick on fire. But both options were ruled out after reviewing the scene, said Kathleen Shimmin of the EPA. Both ideas were abandoned because of health concerns.

“It’s too close to land,” Shimmin said. “We would never consider using dispersement if mechanical cleanup is working, and in this case it’s working . . . We’d use putting toxic chemicals into the environment and posing a potential hazard to the wildlife to clean up a spill as a last step.”

The use of chemical dispersants is controversial because they are toxic to marine life and because their effectiveness is uneven, according to the National Academy of Sciences. State fish and game officials said that if dispersants are used, it would like injury snails, halibut and other bottow-dwelling creatures. It could also fish larvae in the spill area.

“That’s the trade off for not hitting sensitive coastal areas,” said fish and game spokesman Curt Taucher.

Ecological experts and environmentalists who visited the scene said the oil slick threatens to sicken or kill species all through the aquatic food chain--from the microspic plankton that float in fresh water, through mussels and anchiovies and sardines, up to sea lions whose fur can be matted by the crude oil, leaving them vulnerable to the cold.

Clean up efforts centered around several large skimming vessels that attempted to scoop up the oil. Booms were placed around the front of the tanker to contain spilled oil near the hole in the hull, but the size of the larger slick made the use of skimmers necessary.

Although the cause of the spill is still under investigation, the ship’s owner said that alcohol tests performed on the tanker’s skipper initially appear to be “negative.” The results will not be complete, however, for at least two days.

Mike Murphy, vice president of American Trading, said the company considers the tanker’s skipper Robert La Ware “an able and experienced seaman.”

“He has been with our company 30 years and he’s an extremely experienced master on the West Coast,” Murphy told reporters. “He has put this ship and many others on moorings many, many times.”

Shortly after dawn today, about 150 gawkers and volunteers gathered near the Huntington Beach pier to watch the idle tanker offshore and look for oil on the beach.

“I have lived in Huntington Beach all my life,” said Sam Cracchiolo. “But never in a million years did I think this would happen here.”

Residents as far inland as two miles said they could smell the crude. Police dispatchers said they received several dozen calls from concerned residents.

Assemblyman Ted Lempert, chairman of the Assembly Select Committee on Spill Prevention, said that the American Trader’s ruptured tanks contained about 20,000 barrels of crude and about 6,000 barrels were lost.

“The amount of oil spilled from the American Trader is about 3% of what was spilled in the Exxon Valdez tragedy,” Lempert said.