Bird Rescue Station Shuts Down : Crews Prepare for Final Push to Remove Oil

As the tanker American Trader steamed into San Francisco Bay for repairs, cleanup crews marshaled their forces Thursday for a final effort that could take weeks to remove the remnants of a 394,000-gallon oil spill that fouled miles of Orange County coast.

Although it will be a while before the last oily residues are picked up, cleanup officials say, stretches of once-blackened shoreline between Newport Beach and Huntington Beach might be reopened to the public within several days.

“I think it’s gone very well so far, but there is still more work to do,” said U.S. Coast Guard Capt. James C. Card, who is supervising the cleanup.

Meanwhile, the American Trader--with a concrete patch over two holes in its hull--sailed under Coast Guard escort into San Francisco Bay, where it docked about 3:30 p.m. at Southwest Marine Inc., a shipyard at Pier 70.

The 811-foot ship received a 3-foot by

5-foot gouge in the bottom of a forward oil storage compartment when it struck one of its 12.5-foot-long anchors during routine mooring operations on Feb. 7 off Huntington Beach. A second, smaller hole was opened but no additional oil leaked.

Coast Guard helicopters flew over the tanker as it approached the Golden Gate Bridge, then a 41-foot cutter picked up the escort and enforced a strict safety zone around the ship. Two Coast Guard officials boarded the tanker for the final few miles of its voyage from the Port of Long Beach.

In the days ahead, a 15-foot square piece of hull--weighing 8,000 pounds--will be removed and preserved so Coast Guard investigators and others can inspect the damage to the inch-thick steel plating. Repairs are expected to take about a week.

Investigators suspect that the tanker punctured its hull by rolling atop its port anchor while attempting to moor at an underwater oil terminal owned by Golden West Refining Co. of Santa Fe Springs. The accuracy of navigational charts has come into question, and authorities are conducting tests to determine if the waters around the mooring are shallower than indicated.

Back in Orange County, about 35 Coast Guard officers, government officials and representatives of British Petroleum, which owned the spilled oil, met at Huntington Beach City Hall on Thursday morning to discuss final cleanup operations and a timetable for reopening beaches.

In preparation, workers tested sand-cleaning equipment, cleared debris with rakes and shovels and cordoned off stretches of beach with yellow tape to identify areas where oil had accumulated under the sand to depths of up to a foot.

Of concern to cleanup managers and government officials is the discovery of pockets of buried oil along at least six miles of beach from the Huntington Beach Municipal Pier south to 18th Street in Newport Beach.

Authorities estimate that 500 to 1,000 gallons of oil residue and crust might have been driven under the sand by last week’s heavy rain and pounding surf. Most of it will have to be removed or sifted from the sand with rakes, shovels, drag lines or other mechanical devices.

“The whole process of the cleanup’s second phase will try to find out where all of this is,” said Charles Webster, a crisis manager for British Petroleum. “When we are done, we would like to say with a high level of confidence that we have addressed it and successfully dealt with it.”

Between Newland Avenue and the Huntington Beach Municipal Pier, workers made test runs Thursday morning with two beach-cleaning vehicles that British Petroleum hopes to get approved by the state for use in the spill area.

One is a tractor-drawn device that scoops up sand, runs it through a filter and deposits it back on the beach. The other is a disc device that can be used to overturn the sand and expose oil so it can be broken down by sunlight.

Elsewhere, more than 350 workers, including 100 members of the California Conservation Corps, took to a 14-mile stretch of beach for a variety of mop-up procedures. Some crews equipped with low-pressure water hoses scoured patches of oil that were stuck to jetties in Newport Beach and rocky bluffs at Bolsa Chica.

Others scooped oil-stained sand from the beach into plastic trash bags. Debris, including trash and branches, also was removed from the Santa Ana River mouth on the Newport Beach-Huntington Beach border.

“We are just raking up sticks and stuff, so we can come back over and get the oil down in the sand,” said Les Wilkins, 37, a cleanup worker from Anaheim. “It’s keeping us busy.”

One of the most difficult and tedious tasks remained for 64 workers assigned to the jetties at the Santa Ana River mouth, where quarter-inch-thick black crude coated the rocks. Workers in yellow slickers dabbed at the oil with absorbent cloths, while others sprayed it with warm water. The process is expected to take weeks.

To keep oil sheens from entering the nearby wetlands during the cleanup, crews were planning to restore the sand dike across the Santa Ana River mouth, which was washed out last week.

“It’s not like a beach, where you have just one surface,” explained Rick Humphrey, an area supervisor for British Petroleum. “You have to reach behind everything, you have to deal with the tide. Its real time-consuming.”

So far, beaches have been reopened from 15th Street in Newport Beach to Newport Harbor and areas south of the harbor mouth, including stretches of Corona del Mar such as Pelican Point, Crescent Cove and Treasure Cove.

Officials have placed high priorities on reopening Bolsa Chica State Beach and certain stretches from the Huntington Beach pier to Newland Avenue in Huntington Beach. They hope to open those sections within the next few days.

Remaining areas along the 14-mile stretch between the Newport Beach Pier and rocky bluffs near Bolsa Chica--some of the hardest to clean--will be some of the last reopened.

The decision to reopen some beaches in Huntington Beach will hinge upon tests by the city to determine the extent of pollution. Those results will be forwarded to county health authorities, who will decide whether the beaches are clean enough for public use.

With cleanup operations winding down, federal health and safety officials said Thursday that, considering the size of the work force mobilized to clean up the spill, the number of worker injuries has been “minimal.”

Times staff writer Mark Stein contributed to this report from San Francisco. Staff writers Eric Bailey and Steven R. Churm contributed from Orange County with Greg Hernandez.