Oil Slick Reaches Shore at Newport, Huntington Beach : Environment: Shift in wind ends hope to contain spill from tanker, although most remains several miles from coast. Wildlife sanctuary is spared.

After drifting for more than a day off the Southern California coast, the first wave of 300,000 gallons of crude oil spilled by the disabled tanker American Trader began washing up along several miles of Orange County shoreline Thursday night.

Fishermen who braved the advancing slick had to wipe the black goo from their lines, while spectators who ventured to the water’s edge scooped up handfuls of the muck and struggled to clean their hands. And Newport Beach’s mascot, Charlie the Sea Lion, swam through the muck near the Newport Pier.

Lifeguards and city officials in Huntington Beach and Newport Beach reported that an oily brown foam began appearing along the surf line in both cities at about dusk, and continued washing ashore through the night. At first the oil appeared as droplets in the surf, but within hours the water’s surface had turned to a thick, foamy concentration fouling at least half a mile of beachfront.

But Coast Guard officials said the bulk of the slick remained several miles off Huntington Beach, where efforts continued to scoop up the Alaskan crude that spewed from the tanker on Wednesday afternoon.

After a day of optimistic predictions that favorable weather conditions might keep the slick at sea long enough to be cleaned up, a late-afternoon breeze foiled hopes of keeping the oil away from the coastline.

The shift in winds, however, apparently spared a prized wildlife sanctuary any serious damage, authorities said. The Bolsa Chica wetlands, home to several endangered species of birds, was threatened for a time early Thursday as the oil slick drifted northeast from the leaking 800-foot tanker, which apparently struck its own anchor as it attempted to moor off Huntington Beach.

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

“Hitting the beaches is obviously a disaster for us--oil up and down the beaches, the marinas, into the boats, just one thing after another,” said Newport Beach City Councilman Clarence J. Turner. “The whole area is critical.”

As scores of anxious environmentalists, local officials and state experts monitored the worst spill in Southern California in two decades, the purplish slick--about 2 miles long and 4 1/2 miles wide--had drifted slowly most of the day.

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

Federal officials had initially ruled out using chemical dispersants because of their toxic nature. But on Thursday, the 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. A decision is expected sometime today.

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 port-side anchor apparently punctured the single-hulled vessel, the ship’s owner said.

Thousands of gallons of oil poured through a three-foot gash before emergency teams capped the leak early Thursday. The tanker, in a routine maneuver, was preparing to unload its cargo of crude oil 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.”

Although the cause of the spill is still under investigation, the ship’s owner said that alcohol tests performed Wednesday night on the tanker’s captain, second mate and pilot--administered by Coast Guard officials in the presence of Navy investigators--appeared to be negative. The results of drug tests, however, will not be known for at least two days.

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

A stream of local and state politicians descended on Huntington Beach Thursday, staging a series of press conferences to voice support for cleanup efforts and to 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 T. 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, Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner said he would meet with President Bush to brief him on the accident, 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 cleanup moved into its second day, protests from offshore drilling opponents grew.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization, said little comfort could be taken in the fact that most of the spill had remained offshore or that cleanup 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 of the council’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.”

The National Ocean Industries Assn. issued a statement asserting that the spill should not be used as a reason to delay oil leasing off the California coast or any other state.

The trade group said that since 1970, there have been only 10 oil spills in excess of 1,000 barrels on the outer continental shelf. None of those spills caused significant environmental damage, it said.

“Critics of offshore energy development must not be allowed to confuse the facts in an effort to shut down one of the nation’s safest sources of future energy supplies,” the association said.

Despite the warnings, officials said that so far the environmental impact has been remarkably minimal in the worst oil spill 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 grass-roots environmental group.

Huntington Beach officials, who declared a state of emergency, met Thursday night to map out cleanup strategies, keeping 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.”

Fear persisted, however, that the oil could wreak environmental havoc if it reaches shore in quantity.

“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.

Department of Fish and Game director Peter Bontadelli said that if the oil hits the Bolsa Chica wetlands, upper Newport Harbor and the mouth of the Santa Ana River, it would take 2 1/2 years for the ecosystem to recover. The Bolsa Chica wetlands, the focus of intense battles between environmentalists and developers, is home to dozens of bird species, including the light-footed clapper rail and the least tern, 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 crude, the same oil that gushed from the Exxon Valdez last March.

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

“With warmer water temperatures, the (more volatile components of the oil) would (dissipate) 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, the chemicals would likely injure snails, halibut and other bottom-dwelling creatures. It could also kill 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 marine food chain--from the microscopic plankton that float in seawater, through mussels and anchovies and sardines, up to sea lions whose fur can be matted by the oil, leaving them vulnerable to the cold.

Cleanup efforts centered around several large skimming vessels that were attempting 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.

Mike Murphy, vice president of American Trading, said the company considers tanker skipper Robert La Ware to be “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 Thursday, about 150 spectators and volunteers gathered near the Huntington Beach pier to watch the tanker wallowing 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 as two miles inland said they could smell the spilled oil. Police dispatchers said they received several dozen calls from concerned residents.

Assemblyman Ted Lempert (D-San Mateo), 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 that about 7,000 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.

In Sacramento, the chairman of a task force that studied the Valdez spill in Alaska warned state lawmakers that they cannot rely on a private company alone to clean up a spill as large as the one off Huntington Beach, and added that cleanup costs will skyrocket if much of the oil hits the sandy shore.

“Once you’ve got it on the beach, even if you have a successful cleanup, you’re going to incur a tremendous cost,” said Walter B. Parker, chairman of the Alaska Oil Spill Commission.

The following Times staff members contributed to the coverage of the Huntington Beach oil spill. In Orange County--Gregory Crouch, Sonni Efron, George Frank, Shelby Grad, Ted Johnson, Dave Lesher, Maria Newman, Jonathan Weber, Chris Woodyard and Nancy Wride. In Los Angeles--Kevin Roderick and Patrick Lee. In Washington--Rudy Abramson and Robert W. Stewart. In Sacramento--Ralph Frammolino.

AMERICAN TRADER--Puncture by own anchor probably caused oil spill, tanker owner says.A28

OIL AND WILDLIFE--More than 25 oil-covered sea gulls and shore birds washed ashore, eight of them dead. An ecologist said the spill could kill thousands of birds.A28

FATE OF SPILL--Oceanographers don’t know enough about the Southern California coast to predict how tides and winds will affect the oil spill off Huntington Beach.A28