Spill Cleanup Rushed as Oil Sheen Spreads

Cleanup crews patrolled 25 miles of Orange County coastline looking for further oil damage Thursday, and officials closed a stretch of shoreline between Corona del Mar and north Laguna Beach as a thin petroleum sheen drifted offshore.

Patches of the sheen also were reported lingering off Newport Beach and the Huntington Beach Municipal Pier as receding tides pulled back into the surf some of the crude that had reached the sand in recent days.

“If (cleanup crews) didn’t get to it quick enough, (the oil) goes right back out,” said Coast Guard Petty Officer Dennis Hall. “It’s like playing tag.”

As crews worked to capture the beached oil, the investigation of last week’s 394,000-gallon spill from the tanker American Trader focused on the depth of the offshore mooring area where the accident occurred, 1.3 miles off Huntington Beach.

At least three new soundings were under way or planned to measure the depth of the mooring station to determine whether the American Trader was in too shallow waters when it struck its own anchor, gashing the hull and spilling Alaskan crude into the Pacific. Results of the soundings were not made available.

Along the shoreline, the cleanup was concentrated on Newport Beach but concern also focused on the newly restored Huntington Beach wetlands, where heavy amounts of oily seawater collected at the base of temporary earthen dikes in the mouth of the Santa Ana River. Rock jetties leading to the 25-acre estuary were coated with oil, but apparently none of the tainted seawater breached a series of protective booms and dikes.

Wildlife officials said fewer oil-soaked birds were being found. By late Thursday, 368 birds had been rescued alive since the Feb. 7 spill and 15 of those were released back into the wild near Point Mugu in Ventura County. Thus far, 216 birds have died, including 13 California brown pelicans, an endangered species.

With most of the slick now ashore, Coast Guard officials reopened Los Alamitos Bay and the San Gabriel River to boat traffic, but Anaheim Bay, Huntington Harbour and Newport Harbor remain closed indefinitely.

Several sizable patches of glistening sheen--a coating of oil often only thousandths of an inch thick--remained just offshore.

Fingers of the oily sheen washed ashore Thursday as far south as El Moro beach near Laguna Beach and in the Crystal Cove area, a rocky stretch of coast dotted with tide pools teeming with marine life. Although the oil left only a brown film on the rocks, environmentalists fear that any amount of petroleum residue is a threat to sea life.

Officials said they can do little about the sheen because equipment such as skimmers are useful only when oil is thickly concentrated offshore. British Petroleum, owners of the spilled oil, said the sheen, should it come ashore, does not present a serious threat.

After an aerial inspection of the coast Thursday, Coast Guard officials said none of the thicker, dark crude that spilled from the 80,000-ton tanker remained in the ocean.

About 36% of the spilled oil, or 144,600 gallons, was recovered by a flotilla of skimming vessels, while 46%, or 184,800 gallons, was estimated to have evaporated or dispersed in the ocean, Coast Guard spokesman Rick Medit said.

“The rest is on the beach,” Medit said.

As the investigation into the mooring mishap continued, Golden West Refining, owners of the mooring, began taking new soundings of the area under orders from the Coast Guard. Also planning to examine the bottom were the tanker’s owners, New York-based American Trading Transportation Co. and the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Coast Guard officials had reported Wednesday that preliminary readings at the mooring indicated that the water may have been as much as five feet shallower than indicated on current navigational charts.

Authorities say the tanker may have been operating in 46 or 47 feet of water instead of the 51 to 53 feet listed on the charts. At the time of the accident, the ship had a draft of 43 feet. Its anchor is four feet wide and about 10 feet long.

Golden West and American Trading have hired private companies to survey the bottom. Responding to a Coast Guard request to complete a similar study, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will bring one of its small research vessels from Northern California to do the soundings and check depth readings on existing navigational documents, agency spokesman Brian Gorman said.

Gorman said depth readings off Huntington Beach were last taken by the agency in 1975, but navigational charts produced by the National Ocean Service are updated on a more frequent basis from new information supplied by merchant mariners.

Also on Thursday, federal authorities said the ship’s reported coordinates at the time of the spill would have placed the tanker near an underwater obstruction marked on navigational charts.

Coast Guard officials stressed, however, that the vessel may have merely reported an erroneous position and might have been closer to the offshore docking station where it planned to moor and unload its shipment of oil.

“I’m not sure there’s any relevance in this obstruction thing,” said Cmdr. Scott Porter, Coast Guard assistant chief for marine safety in California. “We don’t know when they took that position.”

If the accident actually did occur near the obstacle, about half a mile south of the tanker mooring, it would contradict previous reports of the ship’s position, which placed it near the offshore berth, a U-shaped series of buoys 700 feet wide, forming a collar of sorts around the pipeline. Several crew members said the American Trader was near the mooring and in the process of maneuvering into the sea berth when they felt two sharp bumps a couple of minutes apart, then discovered oil spilling into the sea from the tanker’s damaged hull.

Officials with both the Coast Guard and the National Ocean Service, the federal agency that maps waters off the United States, said they do not know the nature of the underwater obstacle. But one veteran pilot familiar with the Huntington Beach mooring said he believes the obstruction is a pile of boulders dumped into the sea to form a fish habitat.

A majority of the 1,400 workers committed to the cleanup effort Thursday worked along a mile-long stretch of beach between Newport Pier and 47th Street that is still caked with black crude.

Much of the oil has been mopped up with special absorbent materials manufactured by the 3-M Corp. that are designed to soak up to 10 times their weight in oil. The oiled cloths and two-man hand booms--looking much like giant rolled-up bath towels--are gathered into plastic bags and stored in large bins on a seven-acre parcel in the 5600 block of Coast Highway in Newport Beach.

The bins are then emptied into a hydraulic truck. It squeezes out a potentially toxic liquid that is collected by a vacuum truck and taken to refineries that recycle the residue.

The solid waste will be packaged and trucked to a toxic waste disposal site at Buttonwillow, near Bakersfield, and a landfill in the Imperial Valley.

Don McKinnon, a supervisor with GSX, one of the cleanup firms, said the makeshift transfer station should not present a significant health risk to the Newport Beach area.

By Thursday, 23 bins containing about 500 tons of waste were lined up ready to be compacted and shipped. McKinnon said the facility will handle up to 700 tons per day during the two weeks that officials anticipate the transfer station will be in operation.

Investigators from Cal-OSHA and the federal office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have inspected the site and have assured local officials that it meets safety standards.

Times staff writers Eric Bailey, Ted Johnson, Lanie Jones and Dan Weikel contributed to this report, along with Greg Hernandez, Leslie Herzog and Danica Kirka.