Vandal Looses Asphalt, Fouling Flood Channel : Pollution: The thick liquid released at a paving company flowed through two miles of ditch, threatening the fragile Bolsa Chica wetlands for a time.

A vandal unleashed as much as 10,000 gallons of a liquid asphalt from the storage tanks of a paving company, fouling two miles of a flood control channel in central Orange County and leaving a noxious odor in the air, authorities said Thursday.

Emergency response coordinators initially worried that the fast-moving spill might reach the vulnerable Bolsa Chica wetlands and Huntington Harbour on Thursday morning by way of the flood channel’s shallow water. But by placing sand and dirt dams in Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Westminster, they appeared to have contained the spill.

“The biggest spill I’ve worked on is, of course, the Huntington Beach one in February,” said Richard Boon, who routinely handles such incidents as a water pollution specialist for the county Environmental Management Agency. “But this has got to be second. You have a huge amount of contaminant along miles of the channel. It’s a mess.”

The sticky, petroleum-based asphalt sealer and bonder that lined the East Garden Grove-Winterburg Flood Control Channel did not appear to pose any immediate health hazard, officials said. However, they said, there were several sightings of great blue herons, pigeons and crayfish ensnared in the black muck.

The cleanup could take weeks. That process began Thursday morning as dozens of state, county and local crews set up at least five dams, started skimming the contaminated water from the channel and rerouted water headed for that area from northern parts of the channel.

While the spill appeared to have been contained by noon, officials remained cautious because the affected flood channel runs into the heart of the Bolsa Chica wetlands, home to several endangered bird species.

“If we lose those dams, we could be in real trouble,” Jan E. Yost, game warden with the state Department of Fish and Game, warned as she surveyed the scene at the southernmost tip of the affected area, near Brookhurst and McFadden avenues in Westminster.

“This is a fairly major spill as far as we’re concerned,” she added. “There’s a lot of this oil out there and the cleanup’s going to be extensive.”

Outside Dominque Nguyen’s hair styling salon adjacent to the flood channel in Westminster, the southernmost dam produced a bottleneck of thick brown water.

“Why’s the water that color?” Nguyen asked as he gazed out at the site, permeated by a mild odor of oil that was worse in other areas. Told about the spill, he shook his head and said: “That doesn’t seem good for the people.”

Officials say the spill was started intentionally by a vandal, but just how, when or by whom remains a mystery.

The slick was discovered around 3:30 a.m. when a driver at Seal Black, the paving company that was the origin of the spill, arrived for work. Company managers said they had trouble finding the right agency to respond to such a problem.

And even after authorities responded, it apparently took them and company officials several hours--or until about daybreak--before they realized that the slick had penetrated not just the lot and roadside but the adjacent flood control channel as well, state water quality officials said.

The spill started between 5 p.m Wednesday and 3:30 a.m. Thursday.

Investigators and company officials speculate that the saboteur knew the site, based in part on the fact that valves on five active storage tanks were opened while other tanks that had been inactive for some time were left untouched. There were no suspects Thursday.

“I just can’t imagine anyone doing something like this,” William Green, co-owner of the family-run business, said as about a dozen of his workers took shovels to asphalt to try to clean up the mess at his shop at 13812 A Better Way in Garden Grove.

His son, Mark Green, added: “We don’t know of any unhappy employees or anything like that. It’s tough to figure. This is just all a bad dream.”

The elder Green said he has insurance. But he still worried that the exorbitant cost of cleaning up the spill could be enough to break the company, which has been in Orange County for three decades and has annual sales of $2.5 million in private and public paving contracts.

“I just don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said.

The Greens estimated that they lost as much as 10,000 gallons of asphalt product, worth about $10,000 and making up roughly half of their on-site stock. The materials lost were made up mainly of an emulsifier, applied between layers of asphalt to bond it, and asphalt slurry, used as a seal, officials said.

Estimates varied among governmental and company officials about how much of the spill made it into the flood channel and how much was left on the surrounding streets to harden in the hot morning sun. Some said only about 4,000 of the 10,000 gallons reached the channel to drift downstream, while others said they thought nearly all of it did.

William Green said that no matter how much of the asphalt product got into the flood channel, it posed no threat to the public.

“It’s horrible that this happened, but all the stuff does is brown the water--you put 1,000 gallons of it with 100,000 of water, I’ll drink it,” he said.

State water quality officials said the slurry and emulsifier appear to have a relatively low toxicity. The materials, however, could prove to be “a mild irritant” to anyone exposed, said Bruce Paine, on-site coordinator for the California Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Paine added that officials will await water sampling test results to gauge the concentration of the asphalt material and its potential effects.

Those test results, expected back today, will also help determine the course of the cleanup.

If the material is found to be only a minor contaminant, emergency coordinators want to discharge the affected water through manholes into the underground sewer system. If not, they will have to truck it off to water treatment centers at a far higher cost, they said.

Also complicating the cleanup is the fact that the asphalt emulsifier is water-soluble. That means that instead of floating at the top of the low water current in the flood channel for crews to skim it off the top, the material is dispersed throughout the water. As a result, it will take days or weeks to get it all out of the channel.

The skimming started Thursday.

Once all the floating muck is gone, cleanup coordinators will have to worry about excavating dirt-lined portions of the channel and washing the goo off the concrete sides and rocks that line it. The longer that process takes, Fish and Game officials said, the more chance there is for dangerous exposure to passing wildlife.

Said Dale Dillon, chief of public facilities operations for the county Environmental Management Agency, “Right now, it all appears under control, and the fun part starts--cleaning it all up.”