Oil Cleanup Gear Sale Spills Over 50 Acres : Environment: Bidders pick through heaps of Exxon skiffs, radios, bedsheets and sundry surplus in four-day event. Items go for up to 60% off.

America’s biggest oil spill has turned into America’s biggest yard sale.

A year-and-a-half after the Exxon Valdez ran aground, millions of dollars in surplus oil spill cleanup gear is being auctioned off this week in a dizzying selling spree that is attracting buyers from all over North America.

For sale are more than 50 acres of new and used equipment accumulated by Exxon during the cleanup--piles of inflatable boats, a fleet of trucks, cars and buses, warehouses full of office supplies and beds, mountains of fishing nets.

So much gear is for sale--from crates of orange rubber life rings to a turboprop airplane on pontoons--that prospective buyers need a special 335-page catalogue to keep track of it and auctioneers use a rolling, elevated, glassed-in booth to move slowly through masses of people, selling off the merchandise at an estimated 20% to 60% below retail prices.

Among the loot: 50 portable toilets; 300 two-way radios; 243 outboard motors; 10 pallets of sand and kitty litter; 39 fully furnished mobile homes; 67 trucks and utility vehicles; 221 aluminum skiffs; 15 cranes; 20 boxes of coveralls; a box of handcuffs and handgun cleaning kits; a shipping van full of office stationery; 38 pallets of typewriters, copiers, fax machines and paper shredders.

After two summers of removing oil from Alaska’s Prince William Sound, Exxon sold much of its spill equipment to Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers International Ltd., a Vancouver, British Columbia, liquidation firm. No one is saying how much Ritchie Bros. paid, but officials with the auction firm said they hoped this week’s sale brings in at least $10 million.

The auction company put together 4,844 lots of items for the four-day sale, grouped to appeal to individuals as well as commercial buyers. While some lots contain only a single file cabinet or outboard boat motor, there are others with 84 new pairs of size 12 rubber boots and 900 bed sheets.

Some 7,000 people showed up at an airport industrial park to register to bid when the sale opened Tuesday morning--housewives, back country lodge owners, back yard mechanics, shipping and construction company executives. Traffic was backed up for miles, and school buses shuttled customers to the warehouse in the chilly morning darkness.

“I’ve been told to pick up boats,” said Chuck Brobst, an airline jet mechanic who is taking the week off to hunt for bargains for himself and three buddies at work. Some buyers used cellular phones to send bid-by-bid accounts back to the office.

They rummaged through the piles of gear--a box of outdoor thermometers here, a stack of orange stretchers and emergency medical kits there--and were dumbstruck at the mass.

“It’s like poking around the Yucatan ruins. This is the modern equivalent,” said Walt Hays, a fund raiser for an Anchorage charity who took the day off just to watch. “This is what’s left of the great Alaska oil spill.”

Inside a warehouse, Don Harmon, who came up from Texas to buy equipment for his pipeline service company, was looking over shelves stacked to the ceiling with white plastic helmets and gas-mask-style respirators. He said he has been going to government and bankruptcy sales for years but has never seen anything approaching this.

“I’m thinking about bidding on this whole aisle,” he said, noting that he could send it all home in some of the 40-foot shipping containers for sale outside.

Exxon officials have said they plan to return to the Sound next summer to conduct a shoreline survey and do additional cleanup if necessary.