CCC Plans to Set Up Two Oil Spill Cleanup Teams

The California Conservation Corps announced Tuesday that it plans to set up two permanent strike teams of 100 members apiece--one in Southern California and one in Northern California--to help clean up oil spills.

The teams, which are expected to be fully trained and ready by next summer, will be the first full-time cleanup crews stationed on shore anywhere in the nation, state officials said.

“We’ll have two teams ready to respond at a moment’s notice,” said Bud Sheble, state director of the CCC. “We don’t know anyone else who will have a large, pre-trained strike team like this.”

The CCC is a group of 2,000 men and women between the ages of 18 and 23 involved in natural resources work.

The new program will be started with a $75,000 donation made to the CCC on Tuesday by BP America, the company that owned the oil that fouled Orange County beaches in February. The CCC also has been promised $150,000 from a new state oil spill contingency fund established by the Legislature beginning July 1. The remaining funds, about $200,000, are expected to be donated by other oil companies by April, Sheble said.

CCC officials met Tuesday with representatives of BP, Chevron, Shell and Arco.

“We are confident that the oil industry will support us. We have no commitment yet to actual dollar amounts, but we have a very definite commitment from at least Chevron that they’ll support this,” he said.

Officials with BP America, a division of British Petroleum, said they were impressed with the 200 CCC members who helped them clean up the 400,000 gallons of crude oil that spilled from a tanker off Huntington Beach in February.

“During the cleanup in Huntington Beach, people from BP would look down from helicopters and see this group of uniformed people, and they were impressed with the commitment, leadership and work ethic that the CCC has,” Sheble said. “But we told them we can do an even better job if we were pre-trained, and that’s where the idea came from.” Chuck Webster, crisis manager for BP America, said the 200 CCC members who helped with the Huntington Beach spill “were some of the best resources we had out there.”

“They brought with them a sense of discipline and organization that impressed us. We were wary at first because of their age, but they dispelled any thought of that and gave excellent results,” he said.

The oil company hired about 1,000 workers in a five-week cleanup of the oil that soaked 15 miles of beaches in Orange County.

One of the biggest problems in cleaning up oil is rapidly mobilizing enough workers and equipment. The only 24-hour crews that now exist for handling spills are the oil industry’s emergency cooperatives that clean up oil at sea, not on land.

Once the rest of funding comes through, extensive training of crews will begin in May, and the teams should be in place by June, Sheble said. The teams will receive training approved by state and federal occupational-health agencies and participate in annual drills with oil companies and government officials.

All 2,000 CCC members will receive some training, and a core group of around 600 will receive extensive training to ensure that there are at least 200 available at all times, Sheble said.

Pete Bontadelli, director of the state Department of Fish and Game, which oversees oil spill cleanup, said the program is “an indication of the positive working relationship we’re attaining with the oil industry in our efforts to further protect our environment from oil mishaps.”