British Petroleum’s Cleanup Effort Hailed

Coast Guard and local officials raced to the defense of British Petroleum Thursday, one day after the state’s top enforcement officer for the Huntington Beach oil spill accused company officials of foot-dragging in cleaning local beaches.

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. James Card, the chief federal official overseeing the spill cleanup, praised BP’s commitment to do the job. “I always think they (BP) intended to do the right thing. . . . There was never any question about them finishing the job.”

Still, Card said, “The bottom line is: no oil spill is without trouble. . . . You always run into some complications.”

Card’s stance was backed Thursday by city officials in Huntington Beach and Newport Beach, where businesses and beaches were most heavily damaged last month when thick, brown crude oil washed ashore.

Despite the support for BP, however, some federal and state biologists said they concurred with complaints made Wednesday by Lt. Reed Smith, a top environmental officer for the California Department of Fish and Game and the state’s on-scene coordinator of the spill.

“There were things that they (BP) said they would do that just weren’t done,” Smith had said as he cited several problems including delays by BP in cleaning rocks and protecting an Upper Newport Bay estuary.

But Newport Beach Fire Capt. Ray Pendleton, who is overseeing the cleanup for that city, disagreed that the oil company’s efforts had lagged. BP has “kept reaffirming the idea that they were going to stay here (to clean up) until the cows come home.”

Privately, some city officials involved in the cleanup also chastised Smith for disrupting the atmosphere of inter-agency camaraderie and teamwork involved in the cleanup effort.

Since Feb. 7, when the tanker American Trader ran over its anchor and spilled 394,000 gallons of crude off Huntington Beach, at least nine city, county, state and federal agencies have worked with BP and its contractors, meeting daily to discuss how best to remove oil from rocks, plants and sand. BP owned the oil carried by the American Trader and has spent more than $12 million to clean up the spill.

“The concern is to get the job done,” explained one city leader, who asked not to be identified but complained that Smith’s public criticisms weren’t helping. He added: “Hey, all the horses are driving together. So why kick some muck back on the second or third horse?”

Chuck Webster, a BP vice president, also noted that the cleanup operation has been moving well because of the “level of cooperation.”

“Ten years ago this (a spill of this magnitude) would have been a three-month effort,” but instead most beaches have reopened in just three weeks, Webster said. “The absence of finger-pointing about what to do has gotten us where we are today.”

However, several state Fish and Game officials--as well as the oil spill coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service--backed Smith’s contention that BP’s cleanup efforts often experienced unusual and nagging delays.

Steve Goodbred, Southern California spill coordinator for the wildlife service, said BP did “a magnificent job” in quickly opening centers to clean migratory birds at Huntington Beach and Terminal Island.

But when it came to cleaning oil from rocks along the Santa Ana River, “there was some kind of excuse,” Goodbred said. He said he attended one meeting where BP officials agreed with Smith that the rocks needed cleaning. “And then when the issue was revisited--’how come you’re not cleaning the jetty?’ . . . BP folks got very indignant.” In part because of BP’s delays, Goodbred said, oil from the jetties washed into nearby Talbert Marsh when high tides swept over a dike.

BP officials said this week that they were slowed by bad weather, then had to get their rock-cleaning plan approved by the Coast Guard and fly in machinery from Alaska.

When the operation began, however, Fish and Game wildlife biologist Esther Burkett was unimpressed. “A lot of the workers were just spending time sitting at the base of the jetties with their little absorbent pads, just flipping them slowly through the water,” she said. “They needed direction.”

Card said that in such a large cleanup operation, management can be difficult and “you run through a number of miscommunications. But they (BP) have done what you expect. The rock-washing is taking a little longer than we expected” because of technical problems. But there have been “other thousands of actions in this cleanup that were done the way they should have been done.”

In the end, U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Goodbred said the dispute over the cleanup may come because the Coast Guard’s concerns “are somewhat different from Fish and Game’s. He (Card) has an overall concern for the oil spill which is different from specific environmental concerns which are very important to Reed (Smith) and myself. So there was some frustration.” BEACH REOPENED Tests show stretch in Huntington Beach is safe. B2