For Huntington Beach, Oil Spill Still Isn’t Over : Postscript: The slick that fouled the coastline is gone, but it left behind a deep pool of disillusionment.

Six months ago, streams of yellow police tape were strung along 15 miles of oil-soaked beaches like a grim warning, keeping people away from Orange County’s most notorious crime scene.

All over this ocean-side city, people talked--in coffee shops, in press conferences, in City Hall chambers--about the crime against nature, when crude oil gushed from a ruptured tanker onto the beaches on Feb. 7. And they vowed to never let it happen again.

The day after the spill, Janice Belk, a 13-year resident of Huntington Harbour, stood next to the Huntington Pier and watched, startled and helpless, as a tear-shaped, ink-colored slick hovered near the coast. “Oh, goodness,” she said that day. “We won’t be seeing the surfers. We’ll be seeing dead fish and dead birds.”

Now, Belk looks back on a summer full of nature’s restoration. She pedals her bicycle along the shore, relishing all the signs of normalcy.

“The surfers are back,” she said. “I see hundreds of them every day. It’s also good to see the beautiful birds flying in again.”

Nearly seven months after 397,000 gallons of crude spilled from the American Trader’s torn hull, the beaches are clean again, tourists are back, grunion are spawning, birds have nested, seaside businesses are booming and city budgets have almost recovered.

And, about once a week, a giant oil tanker pulls quietly to the terminal off Huntington Beach, unloading millions of gallons of valuable cargo without incident. More tankers than ever use the mooring where the American Trader hit bottom on its own anchor, but they are now restricted to smaller sizes.

In Sacramento and Washington, there has been political fallout from the recent spate of oil-tanker accidents on the nation’s shorelines. Congress and the California Legislature have just adopted new laws that address tanker safety and create multimillion-dollar trust funds financed by the oil industry for handling future spills.

But the final, unresolved chapter of the Huntington Beach spill--determining how badly nature actually suffered and who will pay fines and damages and how much--hasn’t been written. The drama is being played out far from the beach--in lawyers’ offices from Los Angeles to New York.

Although the slick is gone, an undercurrent of disillusionment lingers in Huntington Beach.

Some resentment toward the oil industry, and fears about long-term ecological damage remain. Environmental issues are in vogue now in a city that never had the ecological fervor of nearby Newport Beach or Laguna Beach.

Belk said she looks at her favorite beaches in a new way--as something precious and vulnerable to mankind’s mistakes.

“I always considered myself interested in the environment, but now I’m very concerned,” she said. “Anybody who lives in this area would have to be concerned now.”

Too little time has passed, however, to judge whether all this talk will be transformed into permanent changes in how people treat their natural resources.

Gary Gorman, a firefighter and ecologist who quietly worked for years to save a little piece of Orange County’s coast, knows this better than most.

He and seven other Huntington Beach residents turned a 25-acre muddy patch off Pacific Coast Highway into a bird and fish sanctuary after several years of work. When the oil spewed out of the tanker, the wetlands had been resurrected for less than a year.

A brokenhearted Gorman and others struggled day and night to save the marsh. It survived, but just barely; the brown tide slurped ashore, minutes after they had finished building their dirt dams. Small oily spots soiled the wetlands, but Gorman said the damage seems minimal.

Gorman now believes that the spill left the public with a greater sensitivity about the vulnerability of natural surroundings.

That new awareness, he said, is “the single greatest” legacy left by the spill.

“The environmental movement has been heightened by the spill, but measuring that is difficult--it’s difficult to quantify,” Gorman said.

The first real test will come on Nov. 6, when three slow-growth advocates vie in the election against pro-development candidates for City Council seats.

“People in the city now realize that steps must be taken to protect our beaches, including steps to prevent development,” said Bob Biddle, president of Huntington Beach Tomorrow, a slow-growth organization. “This oil spill made people aware how fragile the whole area is. Until this happened, we’ve always taken our beaches for granted. We never thought something like this would happen to us.”

Perhaps the biggest fallout is that Huntington Beach is no longer willing to look the other way when it comes to the oil industry that once was the community’s dominant economic force.

The City Council is trying to persuade the State Lands Commission, which holds the deed, to cancel the lease at the Golden West Refining Co.’s tanker terminal, the only one off Orange County. The American Trader tore its hull on its anchor at the terminal 1.3 miles offshore as it approached to unload millions of gallons of British Petroleum oil into a pipeline.

Calling its shoreline “the most visited recreational public beaches on the West Coast,” the City Council wrote the state commission that “it would be doing a great disservice to the public” to let the terminal remain open, even though the lease doesn’t expire for 15 years.

“I really feel from a safety standpoint and from an environmental standpoint that our city--in fact the whole Orange County coast--would be better off if this mooring lease were ended,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Thomas J. Mays.

If its terminal is shut down, said Roger Kemple, senior vice president of Golden West Refining, his company will have to find another way to deliver the crude oil to its refinery in Santa Fe Springs. A pipeline now links the Huntington Beach mooring to the refinery, so it would have to build another one elsewhere, or share another company’s berth.

“Any other options (for delivering oil) we look at cost more,” Kemple said, “but they don’t make the operation any safer.”

Coast Guard officials concluded that the accident occurred at the mooring because of a freakish combination of conditions.

Swells of 4 to 6 feet, a low tide, the tanker’s pitching and gradual drifting of sand underneath the mooring all combined at 4:20 p.m. on Feb. 7 to cause the American Trader to bounce on the bottom and pierce its own hull. Tankers with the same draft--the part of the ship that is under water--had used the terminal often, but none had suffered the same fate.

Before the spill, the ocean floor at that spot had not been officially surveyed for years. The area had experienced several major storms since then, but from the charts available, crews were unaware that shifting sand underneath had made the mooring several feet shallower than charts indicated.

Now, under new Coast Guard rules, Golden West Refining must survey depths annually, and ship crews must use sounding devices and limit the sea conditions in which they approach.

Tankers at the mooring also must carry smaller loads to maintain a 6-foot clearance between their anchors and the ocean floor. As a result, Golden West will slightly increase tanker traffic at the mooring. Ten oil tankers have unloaded there since traffic resumed four months ago, according to Coast Guard records. Before the spill, an average of 30 used it yearly.

The new restrictions “have changed how they operate. They’re more cautious now,” said Cmdr. Gary Gregory, chief of port operations for the Coast Guard’s Long Beach office.

In fact, possibly because of the heightened concern for safety, at least three tankers approaching the mooring since April have turned around and awaited safer seas, Gregory said.

“It was a freak accident, and with the new restrictions, the chances of it happening again are about zero,” Gregory said.

Congress last month addressed one major oil-shipping safety issue by adopting a law that requires new tankers to be equipped with double hulls beginning in 1995. It also set aside a $1-billion national trust fund, funded by the oil industry, for cleaning up spills and rehabilitating natural resources.

The state Legislature adopted a measure that sets aside $100 million so that California cleanup operations can begin immediately.

Whether accidental or not, spilling oil into the ocean is a crime--a violation of state and federal water pollution laws.

Sylvia Cano Hale, a deputy attorney general in the state’s Los Angeles office, along with teams of city and federal lawyers, continues to gather evidence in preparation for filing a wide-ranging lawsuit. It is expected to target British Petroleum, the Cleveland-based company that owned the spilled crude oil, but it also could name American Trading Transportation, the New York company that owns the ship and employs its crew, and Golden West Refining.

Lawyers for the shipping company have already taken defensive action, filing papers in U.S. court trying to limit their liability to $8 million, the value of the American Trader ship.

Together with American Trading, British Petroleum spent about $25 million cleaning up the oil-soaked beaches.

The California attorney general’s office, however, hopes to prove that their financial responsibility does not end there. The state plans to seek fines for water pollution violations, reimbursement of city and state cleanup costs and compensation for harm to the economy, recreational resources, wetlands and animal life.

To solicit the public’s ideas about how to compensate for the damages and disruption, state and federal officials will hold a public meeting Sept. 13 at Huntington Beach City Hall.

At the least, the companies could face civil charges that they violated the California water code, which would carry a maximum fine of $20 per gallon spilled, or about $8 million in the American Trader case.

“There’s nothing in (the statute) that says we have to prove intent, negligence or damage,” said Bruce Paine, an associate engineer with the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board. “You just spill the oil, and that’s what it can cost you.”

The city of Huntington Beach recovered $250,000 from British Petroleum, about half the amount it spent on cleanup, including workers’ overtime. The rest will be sought through the litigation.

As the lawyers collect evidence and prepare to file suit, signs of the recovery are everywhere along the shoreline.

On one of the last, waning days of summer at his fish market near busy Newport Pier, dory fisherman Rick Breneman pointed to the blue waters.

“After the oil spill, the waters around here looked like mud,” he said. “Business really dropped off for two months. People kept asking us if the oil had contaminated the fish, but of course we fish way out beyond where the spill was. . . . Now, this summer, I’d say business is about average, the way it is during a summer.”

This summer, Huntington Beach was as popular with tourists as ever, according to the city’s Conference and Visitors Bureau.

“We were pretty successful in getting word out that the beach was cleaned up,” said Diane Baker, the bureau’s executive director.

Beaches show no visible oil, although some residue remains in crevices of rock jetties that occasionally surfaces as tar balls and oil splotches during high tides and swells. But it is quickly cleaned up, city fire officials say.

“I haven’t seen any oil and I’m out there surfing almost every day,” said Bobby Tang, 17, who works at the Frog House surf shop near the Santa Ana River mouth, one of the areas hit hardest by the slick.

“On occasional days, I have seen tar balls, but not recently. I think they did a good job cleaning it,” said Tang, adding that he rarely hears surfers talking about the spill anymore.

Biologists do not know whether all marine life will return like the surfers did. Grunion, killed by the thousands in February when they tried to spawn off Huntington Beach, began laying healthy eggs a month after the spill. There is no measurable long-term damage to the little silver fish, according to biologists with the state Department of Fish and Game.

However, sand-dwelling critters, such as shrimp and crabs, were almost wiped out by the oily tide and have shown no signs of recovery, the state biologists said. The tiny animals probably will repopulate the area within five years, they said. Results of studies on the effects on migratory sea birds have not been released.

As some scars of the spill heal, environmentalists and officials worry that Orange County might just be having a superficial, short-lived love affair with ecology.

“So often people become complacent. They tend to think Prince William Sound (in Alaska, where the tanker Exxon Valdez hit a reef and spilled 11 million gallons of oil in March, 1989) is on the other side of the world,” said Gorman, the restorer of the Huntington Beach Wetlands. “It’s difficult for people to comprehend when something happens that far away.”

“But this spill was on one of the most popular beaches in California,” he said. “It brought home the environment story, so it was a very graphic illustration of what an oil spill really does.”