Storm Drives Last of Oil Spill Ashore : Cleanup: Officials estimate it could take 6 weeks to remove the mess from beaches. None of the wildlife refuges on the coast were damaged.

Battling a stinging and bitter-cold sea spray, about 1,300 workers used rakes, rags and hand-booms to sop up remnants of last week’s 394,000-gallon oil spill that finally washed ashore Wednesday, blackening areas along 15 miles of Orange County beaches.

A fierce overnight windstorm drove most of the remaining slick onto the shoreline from Newport Harbor to Bolsa Chica State Beach. About 100 members of the California Conservation Corps joined the cleanup efforts and another 100 are expected to arrive today.

More than 60,000 gallons of oil reached land by dawn, driven ashore by winds gusting up to 60 m.p.h. With about 82% of the oil having been cleaned up or naturally dispersed, what came ashore Wednesday accounts for virtually all of the remaining crude from the spill on Feb. 7, when the tanker American Trader punctured its hull with its own anchor while mooring at a pipeline off Huntington Beach.

“Everything has hit the shoreline,” Coast Guard Petty Officer Dennis Hall said. “All the oil that was in the water is now on the beach.”

A very light sheen of oil washed ashore at Crystal Cove--near Laguna Beach, the farthest south that the oil has reached, officials said.

“Cleanup down there is a lot more difficult on a rocky shoreline such as that, as opposed to a sandy beach,” said Lt. Reed Smith, coordinating the response for the state Department of Fish and Game. “We were hoping it wouldn’t head that way, but it has.”

At dawn, layers of black crude, six to eight inches thick in some places, greeted officials who were forced to suspend cleanup operations late Tuesday because of the cold and winds. By mid-morning, workers stood shoulder-to-shoulder a mile on either side of the Huntington Beach Municipal Pier, shoveling the muck into plastic bags.

The hardest-hit shoreline was in Newport Beach, just north of the city pier. The goo on the sand was so widespread that police using bullhorns ordered everyone except cleanup workers off the beach.

“It has a lava flow appearance of a mixture of oil and water,” Newport Beach Police Lt. Tim Newman said after surveying the scene.

Despite the windstorm, none of the wildlife refuges on the coast were damaged. Protective booms, dikes and sandbags kept tainted seawater from penetrating waterways leading to the habitats of scores of migratory bird species, including several that are endangered.

However, biologists predicted that the full impact of the spill on shore birds and marine life will not be known for months. By late Wednesday, 340 oil-soaked birds had been rescued, but another 160 had died. Many more may not be found for days--if ever, experts said.

Bill Powell, a patrol captain for the Department of Fish and Game, estimated that two-thirds--and possibly as many as 90%--of the birds affected by the spill will not be recovered.

“Of the birds that have been exposed early, if we haven’t got them yet, they’re probably lying dead somewhere,” Powell said.

Seven dead seals have been found and an injured one washed ashore Wednesday morning. Authorities were trying to determine if the deaths were related to the spill.

In Huntington Beach, Mayor Thomas J. Mays grew increasingly irritated over Gov. George Deukmejian’s refusal to declare stretches of the Orange County coastline--including Mays’ city--a disaster area. The city formally sought the disaster declaration on Monday, but the governor’s office has so far not acted on the request, saying cleanup operations were proceeding smoothly and there was no need for state assistance because British Petroleum is paying the full cost of the cleanup.

“Right now, there is no need for such a declaration,” said Bob Gore, the governor’s press secretary. “We’ve asked the city to ‘tell us what you need,’ and we’ve provided everything that’s been asked of us.”

Mays disagreed on the assessment.

“They find two fruit flies and they declared that a natural disaster . . . and yet you have hundreds of gallons of oil and toxic waste coming in here,” Mays said during a morning press conference. “I guess that’s my major complaint.”

Meanwhile, an investigation into the tanker accident has preliminarily revealed that the ship may have been operating in water five feet shallower than indicated on depth charts, a Coast Guard official said Wednesday.

Authorities said the American Trader may have been operating in 46 or 47 feet of water instead of the 51 to 53 feet listed on depth charts, said Cmdr. Scott Porter, assistant chief for marine safety in the California district. If true, it would mean the ship had less than five feet of water under its hull at the time of the accident. The ship’s anchor is 10 feet long.

Gill net fishermen filed a $10-million claim in Los Angeles federal court against British Petroleum, charging that the spill has devastated halibut fisheries off the Southern California coast. The tanker accident occurred in prime spawning grounds at the peak of the halibut season, and fishermen have been prohibited from fishing those waters because of the spill.

On the beach, officials supervising the cleanup were reluctant to speculate on how long the process will take. But several crew supervisors on the beach said it could take as long as a month to six weeks to mop up the mess.

“That may turn out to be right, but we really just don’t know right now,” said Tom Thomson, a public affairs officer for British Petroleum. “We’ll be here as long as it takes.”

Company and Coast Guard officials agreed, however, that having the oil accounted for is good news.

“The worst of it, from the standpoint of not knowing where the oil is, is over,” said Fred Garibaldi, a BP executive. “We know exactly what we have to deal with.”

As workers methodically combed the beach, they piled up thousands of pounds of oil-soaked cloths and mops. The potentially toxic materials are temporarily being stored in steel containers at the Newport Beach Sewage Treatment Plant, a seven-acre facility near Pacific Coast Highway and the Santa Ana River, said Bob Dixon, Newport Beach public utilities director. At the treatment plant, the cleanup materials will be tested to determine if they are hazardous before being transported to a landfill approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Officials said the landfill has not been selected yet.

Many of the cleanup workers were draped in three or four layers of clothing on Wednesday, braving the blasts of frigid sea air to earn $10 an hour. Others said they felt a sense of public service to remain on the cleanup line.

Antone Pagan, a 49-year-old worker from Long Beach, was in an area just south of the Balboa Pier when some of the oil-soaked foam blew into his face.

“It felt like it was on fire,” said Pagan, whose skin was daubed with cream. Pagan added that his supervisors suggested he visit the hospital, but he declined.

Other workers complained of headaches and nausea, and officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration tested the air for traces of benzene, a toxic substance that is sometimes found in crude oil. The test, conducted early Wednesday morning, proved negative.

The spill’s impact on local businesses continued to mount Wednesday. Harbors at Anaheim Bay and Newport remained closed to boat traffic, angering sportfishing and charter operators idled by the spill.

Karen Kelley, president of American Yacht Charter, which provides boats for weddings in Newport Harbor, said that she has had three wedding parties cancel since the spill. She estimated that business is “off by about a half,” and the company has lost about $15,000 in bookings.

“We sell them by the blue water and the blue sky and that’s not going to be the case,” Kelley said. “They are afraid to go out. They don’t want to go out in the oil.”

Operators of whale-watching boats have also been hurt. Monika Sloan, owner and operator of the Schooner Spike Africa, which takes tourists to watch the California gray whales migrate off the coast, said, “We’ve been put out of business.”