Mop-Up ‘Turns Corner’ as More Shore Reopened : Oil spill: Biological tests find no public health threat. Officials say beaches in many areas are cleaner than before the disaster.

About a mile of beach between the Newport and Balboa piers was reopened Tuesday after a battery of biological tests found no public health threat from crude oil that blackened long stretches of Orange County shoreline after the Feb. 7 spill.

Officials announced that several more miles of shoreline in Newport Beach and Huntington Beach could be reopened to sunbathers and surfers today, a sign that the massive $12-million cleanup of the 394,000-gallon spill from the tanker American Trader may soon end.

“We’ve definitely turned a corner,” said a smiling but exhausted Huntington Beach Fire Chief Raymond C. Picard.

Mop-up operations have been so thorough that Picard and others say beaches in many areas are cleaner than before the spill--a bonus to beach-goers who have been banned for three weeks from 10 miles of some of California’s most popular strands. Gone are bottle caps, cigarette butts and candy wrappers. “It’s amazing,” said one Newport Beach lifeguard. “It’s never been this squeaky clean.”

Picard said that repeated sanitizing of beaches with heavy machinery has removed oil globs and even “fluffed” the sand.

“If you pick this sand up and put it on a slope, you could ski on it,” said Picard, the city’s oil spill operations commander.

As beaches began reopening, British Petroleum Tuesday consolidated its cleanup operations at the lifeguard headquarters at Huntington State Beach near Magnolia Street, about a half mile from the Santa Ana River where scores of workers scrubbed oil-stained rock jetties.

At a press conference in Long Beach, Admiral Paul A. Yost, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, said the spill recovery effort stands as “a textbook case of an excellent cleanup. . . . The job is basically done. There is very little left.”

In Huntington Beach, concern eased about damage to a newly restored wildlife habitat fouled last weekend by a thin layer of oily residue carried into the marsh by high tides. Most of the oil sheen in the channel linking the marsh with the ocean had been removed by Tuesday, and biologists decided to leave the brownish residue that lightly coated several of the wildlife nesting islands, fearing that cleanup efforts might disturb the ecologically sensitive mud flats.

“We’re going to let it dry and bake in the sun and hope nature takes care of it,” said Gary Gorman, executive director of the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy.

Along the shoreline, public health and safety remained the chief concern, and the release Tuesday of the first results from tests on samples of sand fouled by the spill were encouraging. The tests are required by local municipalities and county health officials as the last step before bans on beach use from Newport Harbor to Bolsa Chica State Beach near Warner Avenue could be lifted.

State and local officials have agreed that a beach is safe for public use if the average levels of petroleum hydrocarbons--including benzene and toluene, both cancer-causing agents--are below 100 parts per million. The average for 84 samples--taken every 500 feet between the Newport and Balboa piers--was 14.3 parts per million, said Richard Wade, president of Med-Tox Associates Inc., an Anaheim-based environmental health firm hired by British Petroleum to conduct the tests.

“We are satisfied that the beach is safe,” said Newport Beach Fire Capt. Randy Scheerer. “We opened the beach about noon. It’s a step in the right direction.”

More beaches may reopen today when test results are expected for a stretch of shoreline from the Balboa Pier to Newport Harbor and for much of Bolsa Chica State Beach. It takes about 30 hours to complete the tests on sand collected at depths ranging from six to 10 inches below the surface, Wade said. Chemists took samples in Huntington Beach on Tuesday for the first time, and officials said some of the city’s shoreline there may be reopened, if tests are favorable, on Thursday.

Once beaches reopen, Ronald Rasmussen, an associate adjunct professor of community and environmental health at UC Irvine, said exposure to any leftover oil could cause minor skin irritation. But he emphasized that any oil residue on the beach would not cause long-lasting toxic effects.

ON THE BEACH

Officials began Tuesday to open more portions of the Orange County shoreline that had been tainted by Alaskan crude spilled Feb. 7 by the tanker American Trader.

WHAT’S OPEN

All beaches south of Corona del Mar

About a mile of beach between the Newport and Balboa piers

All beaches north of Bolsa Chica State Beach from Warner Avenue to the Orange-Los Angeles county line.

WHAT’S CLOSED

Bolsa Chica State Beach

All city and state beaches in Huntington Beach

Newport Beach from the Santa Ana River to Newport Pier and from Balboa Pier to Newport Harbor

Source: County and city officials.