Spill Threat Reduced but Precautions Will Remain : Environment: Rain forecast forces lowering of temporary Santa Ana River dam. Cleanup crews are cut but beaches stay closed.

Even as an extensive effort at mopping up the last of last week’s 394,000-gallon oil spill was scaled back Friday, a light foam of oil began washing ashore from Crystal Cove State Beach, south of Newport Beach, to Abalone Point late in the afternoon.

The news sent local officials and about 40 cleanup workers scrambling to keep the oil from washing into tide pools teeming with sea life along the rocky coastline.

“It looks like the consistency of chocolate mousse, only a little foamier,” said Bob Scruggs of the Laguna Beach Fire Department, who is coordinating local response for South County beach cities. “It’s really hard to clean out of there with the tide action.”

The work, however, was halted for the night because officials said it was too dark in that remote stretch of beach.

Cleanup work crews were reduced to about 600 Friday throughout the area affected when the American Trader apparently gashed itself with its own anchor off Huntington Beach Feb. 7 and spilled some of its oily cargo into the ocean. The number of workers was down from more than 1,000 earlier in the week.

But officials said they would keep many of the workers on call because a cold front from Alaska that has been making its way south all week is expected to dump as much as an inch of rain on the area during the weekend.

That is bad news for environmentalists and clean up workers who have been carefully eyeing a temporary earthen dam built last week to hold oil-tainted seawater away from the mouth of the Santa Ana River, which leads to the sensitive Huntington Beach Wetlands.

On Friday, officials decided to breach the dam into the Talbert Channel, because storm water could cause flooding upstream. But lowering the dam by four feet, as planned, is a calculated risk to the wildlife on the other side of the marshlands the dam was designed to protect.

“It’s a gamble,” said Gordon Smith, director of the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy. “I’m concerned that if we have a really heavy storm it will sweep the berm away. It could wash out completely and leave us exposed to a considerable amount of oil on the rocks.”

Last week’s spill has affected 14 miles of beach and has forced closure of the entrances to the Newport and Huntington harbors and Long Beach Marina to the north. It also caused beach closures along that stretch, where at one point workers clad in yellow stood shoulder to shoulder to pick up oiled sand with absorbents, rakes and shovels. But even though the workers are now sparser, officials said that some of those beaches will remain closed to the public at least until next month.

“Right now, all we’ve been able to say is they’ll be open (to the public) March 7,” said Huntington Beach lifeguard Steve Reuter. “Seal Beach is open, so if you want to surf, go to Seal Beach.”

Said Capt. Ray Pendleton of the Newport Beach Fire Department: “If we allowed people back on the beaches, we’d have a problem with them trampling the oil into the sand.”

He also said people would get in the way of equipment still out on the beach. “We don’t want to get someone run over by any of these front loaders.”

Coast Guard officials flew over the area several times during the day Friday to survey the damage, and found only a light sheen extending from Huntington Beach to Reef Point near Corona del Mar, they said. It was concentrated a couple of miles south of Huntington Beach, with fingers of oil spreading out. One skimmer was working off Reef Point, and two others were moving between Huntington Beach and Newport Beach.

“It’s real light,” said Petty Officer Carolyn Feldman. “They’re just trying to pick up what they can.”

Officials said the sheen is very light transparent oil that is difficult for the skimmers to pick up.

They also said that an “extra-light oil” is still coming up on Bolsa Chica State Beach, and that there was “light contamination” in Huntington Beach from the Santa Ana River to 55th Street in Newport Beach.