Oil’s Spread Frustrates Cleanup of Ocean Spill

Although only a third of the nearly 400,000 gallons of oil spilled offshore Wednesday remained at sea Sunday, the meandering crude was so dispersed that cleanup crews held little hope of skimming much more of it from the water.

With a mild cold front expected in Southern California late today or Tuesday, cleanup officials said resulting onshore winds could blow the estimated 131,000 gallons ashore to be collected by more than 400 workers who have been deployed between Laguna Beach and Seal Beach with absorbent pompoms and foam pads.

Then again, officials said, waves associated with the weather front could break up the oil altogether before the slick reaches land.

“I wish I knew where it would go,” mused Roy McClymonds, general manager of Clean Coastal Waters of Long Beach--a nonprofit oil industry cooperative assisting in the cleanup. “I wouldn’t even want to guess.”

On Sunday night, thick frothy oil, known as “mousse” to cleanup crews, began coming ashore at the Huntington Beach Municipal Pier and along a 3.5-mile stretch to the north. The Coast Guard said 200 workers were to be sent to the soiled areas by midnight, and additional booms would be placed off the Anaheim Bay jetty.

A small flotilla of 14 skimming vessels had been deployed Sunday, and another four were to join in the cleanup today. However, U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Dennis Hall said the skimmers were greatly handicapped in their oil collection efforts because the oil had spread in many areas into a thin sheen, with microscopic thickness in places. And the sheen--already 14 miles long and five to six miles wide Sunday afternoon--was continuing to expand, Hall said.

The sheen was so thin that additional boats had to be called in Sunday to corral the oil into heavy enough concentrations for the skimmers to function, said McClymonds, whose cooperative is operating nine of the skimmers. This was done, he said, by dragging long extensions of containment boom behind the vessels.

“It takes longer,” McClymonds said of the corralling process. “Obviously, we have to go for a while until we get a concentration. The thinner the oil gets, the less effective the skimmers are, until you concentrate the oil in a larger pocket.”

Coast Guard Capt. James Card, who is heading the cleanup, estimated that roughly two-thirds of the oil has been accounted for--about 23% through skimming and other recovery methods and 43% through evaporation, leaving 131,087 gallons at sea.

Pointing to favorable winds since the spill, Card and other federal officials said the Huntington Beach cleanup has proven more successful than in other spills, which have seen an average recovery of only about 10% of the lost oil.

“We’re very happy with the results so far, but we’ve still got a ways to go,” Card said.

A critical spot now remains the mouth of the Santa River--and the Huntington Beach wetlands that sit just a half-mile behind it. The wetlands are a vulnerable environment supporting rare animal species. Cleanup crews devoted some of their efforts to the wetlands Sunday, working to shore up a temporary dam in case of a storm.

“That is the one area we’ve seen so far that has had a real threat from the oil and, of course, that’s a very sensitive area,” said Lt. Reed Smith of the state Department of Fish and Game.

Despite a man-made sand dam and layers of booms at the mouth of the river, some minimal amounts of oil may have seeped through during high tide Sunday and over the last few days, officials said.

Gordon Smith, administrator for the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy, said: “The probability is that if a storm comes Tuesday or Wednesday, the sand (dam) just won’t hold. The more saturated it gets, the more erosion there is.”

Worried about that prospect, cleanup officials decided to add a layer of sandbags to the Santa Ana River dam to try to protect it from a potential storm. At the same time, they also planned to open a notch in the dam to allow fresh water into the wetlands.

Should the oil reach the 2.5 acres of marshland behind the mouth of the river--an area that is now undergoing restoration, “it’ll set us back years,” Smith said. The oil, tough if not impossible to clean from marshlands, would coat the muddy bottom of the wetlands and threaten small animals at the base of its food chain, he said.

Containment booms in place at entrances to a number of other environmentally sensitive areas, including the Bolsa Chica wetlands, were reinforced Sunday after a Coast Guard overflight showed that the oil sheen had extended farther northwest, to an area off Seal Beach.

Floodgates connecting the Bolsa Chica wetlands to Anaheim Bay were closed as a precaution. The mouth of Anaheim Bay, which is the entrance to the Bolsa Chica sanctuary, was protected with a triple boom, a Coast Guard utility boat and a skimmer. New booms were placed across the entrance to Alamitos Bay and the San Gabriel River estuary late Saturday to protect marinas and wildlife habitat.

While only small amounts of oil washed ashore through most of Sunday, heavier deposits appeared after dark, and cleanup crews stationed along the coast braced for an onslaught of goop.

“It’s not so bad right now, but we’re expecting it to get much worse,” said cleanup worker Angela Bowen, 18, of Riverside as she took a lunch break from her patrol duties near the Huntington Beach Pier.

In all, area beaches were patrolled by 415 workers for an assortment of cleanup contractors retained by British Petroleum America Inc., which leases the stricken tanker American Trader from American Trading Transportation Co. of New York.

In the company’s first hint at what the massive cleanup operation might cost, British Petroleum spokesman Charles Webster said the company has already spent “millions and millions” of dollars. The bulk of that expense has gone toward hiring hundreds of cleanup workers and providing equipment, he said.

British Petroleum officials said their contractors managed to maintain a full deployment Sunday, despite an edict from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Saturday that some workers would have to be sidelined temporarily because they had not undergone the required 24 hours of training in oil cleanup.

All the workers remained on the job Sunday as contractors worked out a schedule with OSHA for the training to be undertaken early this week, said Tony Kozlowski, a British Petroleum spokesman.

Although cleanup crews on the beach had little to do except patrol and pick up occasional oil-stained garbage, police and lifeguards kept beaches closed between Newport Beach and Seal Beach to all but authorized visitors. In Huntington Beach, however, that edict did not keep back the curious, who dashed from an open bicycle path to the oily shore.

“One person will go, and then you get a whole flood of people,” said Rick Reisenhofer, a Huntington Beach state lifeguard. “We get a lot of looky-loos, and you can’t blame them really. A lot of people have been frustrated because they don’t know what they can do to help.”