SPECIAL REPORT: Oil on the Beach : A Journal Written in Black: Tracing the Oil From Ship to Shore : Chronology: A tanker’s offshore mooring goes terribly wrong, then the dynamics of nature and the limitations of man take over.

It began routinely enough, just another ship on a calm ocean beneath blue skies.The vessel was the 811-foot American Trader, carrying a crew of 25 and millions of gallons of crude oil from a supertanker off Long Beach to an underwater pipeline off Huntington Beach. From the pipeline the oil would flow to Golden West Refining in Santa Fe Springs, just as it always had before.

The tanker crawled slowly and uneventfully from Long Beach Wednesday. By afternoon, probably a little after 3 p.m., the tanker captain, Robert La Ware, radioed ahead to Huntington Beach for a local mooring pilot to join him as the ship neared its destination southwest of “Surf City’s” storm-ravaged pier.

“It’s a tricky maneuver,” said Sanford Schmidt, president of American Trading Transportation Co., which owns and operates the American Trader. “The captain needs to back the vessel into an offshore mooring, which is a nest of buoys.”

Although the maneuver takes practice, it is not considered especially difficult for experienced pilots and captains. La Ware was a skipper with 30 years of experience at sea. John Keon, the full-time, self-employed mooring pilot who boarded the American Trader, was experienced too. Both men had performed the technique many times before, and observers agreed that it should not have posed an unusual challenge that day. Winds were light, swells were four feet and from the west--nothing out of the ordinary, except the tide was unusually low.

Keon came aboard about 4 p.m., officials said, and the ship promptly dropped one forward anchor, then the next, preparing to swing on the anchor cables and back up into the 700-foot wide, U-shaped mooring area.

Within a few minutes of dropping the anchors, something went frightfully wrong. Oil began gushing from the tanker. Eventually, nearly 400,000 gallons spilled out, Southern California’s worst oil spill since the huge discharge off Santa Barbara in 1969.

Exactly what happened was unclear, but the anchor was the suspected culprit.

“It looks like it (the ship) rode up over its anchor and punctured on it,” said Coast Guard Adm. J. William Kime, as investigators revealed that the anchor had punctured the hull at least twice.

“The anchor is now bent like a banana,” Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Mark Kennedy said after divers emerged from a look at the ship’s underside.

The accident ruptured the No. 1 Starboard Wing Tank, one of three forward oil-bearing compartments of the 80,000-ton vessel, which was built in Philadelphia in 1969 and has worked the Alaskan oil service off and on for the last five years. That compartment, according to company records, holds about 1.3 million gallons of oil, a fraction of the vessel’s 23-million-gallon capacity.

Oil gushed out furiously. Thousands of gallons spilled into the water within minutes and began drifting from the ship, defying crew members on a work boat escorting the tanker who scrambled frantically to contain the oil with a vinyl boom.

“In calm seas, a boom like that can usually contain a spill,” said John DeVries, manager of shipping and receiving for Golden West Refining. “Obviously, it didn’t this time.”

By 5:19 p.m., local Harbor Patrol officials were on hand to review the damage, and the Coast Guard dispatched its crews as well: A helicopter flew over the area to videotape the scene at 5:42 p.m., and a 41-foot Coast Guard craft arrived at 6:03 p.m.

Coast Guard investigators also boarded the vessel, and by 7:24 p.m. the American Trader’s captain and pilot, as well as its first and second mates, had all been administered drug and alcohol tests. The alcohol tests were negative; results of the drug tests are taking longer to analyze.

As the Coast Guard and other agencies rushed to take up their places for the cleanup, residents and community leaders ashore braced for the worst. The sea air at the shore was laced with malodorous whiffs of petroleum. The slick, by then already two miles long and several hundred yards across, hovered at the horizon, edging slowly toward popular Huntington Beach and the environmentally sensitive wetlands of Bolsa Chica and the river estuaries.

Shortly after 9 p.m., Coast Guard officials warned that oil would wash ashore at about midnight. The Huntington Beach City Council convened at 9:15 p.m. to declare a state of emergency. In Washington, where the state’s entire congressional delegation was dining at the National Press Club, officials received word of the spreading oil, and some rushed back to their home districts early the next morning.

But when dawn broke Thursday, the oil had not reached the beaches, having been kept offshore by a favorable breeze from the land, which enabled cleanup crews to corral some of the oil with retention devices near the ship.

Still, many residents remained concerned. At sunrise about 150 area residents had wandered to the shore, anxiously peering across the waves and dreading what the tide might drag in.

Environmental groups set up impromptu stations to rescue sea birds soaked in oil. At first, the casualties were light: Fish and Game officials reported 12 birds affected Thursday morning.

Injured and dead birds continued to trickle in, however, until by day’s end the toll had grown to 25 oil-covered gulls, grebes, cormorants and scoters. Eight of the birds died, and more were feared lost at sea.

“This kind of spill certainly has the potential to kill thousands of birds,” said Richard Veit, a UC Irvine marine ecologist.

British Petroleum, owner of the oil aboard the tanker, contributed equipment and advice to the government agencies flooding the area with boats and cleanup crews by midday Thursday and into the weekend. Five skimmers were working on the slick by the end of the day, and a barge began removing the remaining oil from the American Trader’s ruptured tank.

Still, the boats, crews, favorable weather and technology were not enough to thwart the slick. Late-afternoon tides and wind began to turn the slick, by then a mottled blob covering about eight square miles--rubbing its northeastern corner along the popular beaches of Orange County and daubing them with a goo that looked and felt like cooled bacon grease. At 4:30 p.m., Newport Beach’s city manager had formally declared the city a disaster area, giving the police power to close beaches to the public.

By 7:30 p.m. Thursday, a thin finger of drifting oil had reached back to the beach. An apparently unscathed Charlie the sea lion, Newport Beach’s mascot, swam through gathering gobs of oil drifting ashore at the Newport Pier.

What began as a trickle of brown droplets within hours became thicker, and by midnight a thick, foamy brown slime stained parts of Huntington and Newport beaches.

City officials in both areas were dismayed.

“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,” Newport Beach City Councilman Clarence J. Turner said. “The whole area is critical.”

Friday was another day of shifting tides. As dawn broke, Newport cordoned off its beaches. Dozens of workers scoured the beaches, mopping the incoming tide with absorbent cloths and mops. The tide continued to rise throughout the early morning; not until it peaked at 8:31 a.m. did crews begin to hope for a turnaround.

By then, five miles of Newport Beach had been soiled, along with a smaller stretch of coast in Huntington Beach. The slick had widened to an area covering about 18 square miles, though it was evaporating and becoming thinner as the hours passed.

Coast Guard officials supervised American Trader operators as they pumped out the remaining oil in the damaged holds to prevent further spillage.

Far from the ocean, in Orange County Superior Court, two state sportfishing organizations filed a lawsuit accusing British Petroleum and American Trading Transportation Co. of negligence--which BP denied--and claiming more than $1 billion in wildlife and beach property had been damaged.

Keon said at his home in San Jacinto that he was as upset about the spill as anyone, but he was not to blame.

By evening, brown-and-black goo was reported washing ashore at various spots along the long stretch of county coast after the slick changed course in the middle of the afternoon and moved north, threatening again two significant coastal wildlife refuges near Huntington Beach and Seal Beach.

“The worst of it is here,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Thomas J. Mays, who toured the coast by helicopter at dusk.

During the night and into Saturday the oil lapped beaches in various spots between Newport Harbor and Huntington Pier. The coast guard closed Anaheim and Newport Bays and Huntington Harbour to boaters in an effort to save what it called “critical Southern California wetlands.”

The damage to sea and shore, bad as it was, was lessened by gifts of nature and technology: The spill occurred near a major urban center, allowing cleanup personnel to be on the scene within hours; warm weather helped evaporate the oil; calm seas made it relatively easy to scoop up; offshore winds gave crews time to get in place.

Even with all that, there was still widespread damage, and the waters off Southern California absorbed a powerful body blow.

To environmentalists and oil experts, the message was clear: “Here’s a case where everything went right,” said Clifton Curtis, executive director of the Oceanic Society in Washington. “And still you’re going to have a dead zone out in that water where this spill occurred.”