SPECIAL REPORT: Oil on the Beach : Cleanup Won’t Erase All Blemishes : Recovery: Depending on where the wind takes the slick, the mopping-up process could take months. But in the end, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

When U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jim Card was first called to head the cleanup of a 600,000-gallon oil-barge spill in St. Louis along the Mississippi River in 1983, he surveyed the damage and made a prediction for those who asked: The job should be done in three weeks.

That was before fierce rains caused the river to rise dramatically. Before tons of unnoticed, oil-soaked debris turned up along the banks. Before his crew mastered new, propeller-driven swamp boats to herd the oil slick.

In fact, it was six weeks before the cleanup was declared done. And that was the last time Card made a prediction about an oil-spill cleanup.

If there is any common denominator to such oil debacles as the 11.1-million gallon spill by Exxon Valdez in Alaska, the 3.2-million gallon Santa Barbara spill in 1969, and the spill of 400,000 gallons in the marshlands of the Suisun Bay northeast of San Francisco in April, 1988, it is that there is no good barometer for judging just how quick or how successful a cleanup operation will be, say experts in the field.

Complicating matters further, these experts say, is that few agree just when the job is done.

“The age-old question in this business is how clean is clean?” said Card, who is coordinating the response to last week’s maritime disaster off Huntington Beach. “And when do you stop cleaning or risk doing more harm than good?”

As officials battled this weekend to protect wetlands, wildlife refuges and other especially sensitive coastal treasures, they were thankful that, for the most part, the impact of the nearly 400,000-gallon spill appeared confined to the open seas and to several miles of coastline in Newport Beach and Huntington Beach that could feasibly be cleaned.

At week’s end, as many as 17 skimmer boats continued the laborious, round-the-clock task of sucking up oil from the open seas. Slowed at times by the spill’s transformation from a concentrated slick into a more distilled, light sheen, they had collected about 550 of the 6,000 lost barrels in the first two days.

Lead-weighted “booms”--or absorbent barriers of a synthetic material--remained strategically placed to protect key coastal areas from the slick. Hundreds of workers on 12-hour shifts took to the sands of Huntington and Newport beaches to mop up the oily scum that had left its mark on local shores.

And officials waited.

“So far, we seem to have averted a situation that could have been a lot worse,” Barry A. Williamson, head of the U.S. Minerals Management Agency, which oversees offshore drilling, said last week as he flew over the site. “The response has gone very well, and the spill’s been very well contained.”

But the key variable--the one that will decide the course of future cleaning operations and the extent of damage--was the wind.

“You go outside and stick your finger in the wind--that’s ultimately the determining factor,” Victor Leipzig, executive director of the Bolsa Chica Conservancy, said as he sought to seal off part of the wetlands refuge on the border of Huntington Beach from the oncoming spill.

Added Tony Kozlowski, a spokesman for British Petroleum America Inc.: “It’s just a matter of how the weather is, how the oil behaves, how the winds are blowing and how much the skimmers pick up.”

British Petroleum leased the damaged tanker, the American Trader, from the New York-based American Trading Transportation Co. The firms have said they will take full financial responsibility for the cleanup.

Depending on where the wind takes the slick, the cleanup job could take days, weeks or months. The more oil that hits tough-to-clean areas such as jetties, marshlands and refuges, the longer it will take.

The answer is anyone’s guess--anyone, that is, except for coordinator Card.

“I don’t make predictions,” the Long Beach-based captain said. “Our goal, really the only goal, is to make sure we do the best job we can of getting the cleanup done; time isn’t a factor.”

What may be a factor, some charge, is politics--as seen in the debate last year between state and company officials over the adequacy of Exxon’s cleanup of the Alaskan disaster, and hinted at again last week in the flood of politicians who hit the Orange County beaches to highlight the dangers of oil drilling and shipping.

“It’s an election year, and everyone wants to tie themselves to the environment and use this as a stick,” observed Lt. Commander Alan Carver of the U.S. Coast Guard. “So I’m sure that in the eyes of some, nothing will be enough until every single molecule is accounted for.

In reality, however, even the most ardent environmentalists grudgingly acknowledge that no cleanup will completely eliminate the spilled oil.

“Once human error allows an environmental disaster to get started, all the good intentions and high technology in the world don’t seem able to put the genie back in the bottle,” Leipzig said. “There’s no way you’ll get all the oil.”

Given that reality, environmentalists said their concern is not to play politics, but to make sure that the accident is not simply swept away and forgotten. The potential disruption to myriad species of plants and wildlife that depend on the ocean and shore areas may linger long after the skimmers and cleanup crews have left the scene, they warn.

“It will have an effect on the sand community and probably on the tidal community,” said Elizabeth Brown, president of Laguna Greenbelt, a Laguna Beach environmental group. “I don’t think it’s possible for this stuff to be scooped on towels and put away. It may look good as far as the tourists are concerned, but it isn’t.”

Brown added that, after the massive 1969 Santa Barbara spill, oil was found embedded in deep layers of sand a decade later.

In a study on the aftermath of various oil spills around the world, the National Academy of Sciences has documented environmental damage that persisted years after the incident. (The study uses tonnage figures to measure spills. By comparison, the nearly 400,000 -gallon spill last week is roughly equal to 1,324 tons.)

Eleven years after the 1970 spill of 10,000 tons of fuel oil from the tanker Arrow into Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia, for example, heavily damaged marsh grass still had not made a complete recovery, according to the academy’s study. Nor had the bay’s fiddler crab population--virtually wiped out by the spill.

In 1969, the barge Florida foundered on rocks off Massachusetts’ West Falmouth Harbor in Buzzards Bay, spilling 630 tons of fuel oil. The next day, a storm drove the oil ashore, killing small fish, invertebrates and marsh grasses. Six years later, the study found, there were fewer species in the area and the soft-shelled clam population still suffered from oil contamination.

One of the world’s most destructive spills occurred March 16, 1978, when the tanker Amoco Cadiz broke up on rocks off the coast of Brittany, unleashing 223,000 tons of crude. This oil was driven ashore by high winds, fouling more than 200 miles of French coastline. Two years later, marshes in heavily oiled areas had not recovered at all. Sandy beaches retained oil for several years after the spill.