Small Oil Spill Is Cleaned Up Before It Reaches Shore : Environment: Illegally dumped by an unknown vessel, the fuel came within 100 yards of Bolsa Chica State Beach before being skimmed up.

A small oil slick--apparently fuel dumped illegally by an unknown ship--was cleaned up Friday off Bolsa Chica State Beach before it reached shore, Coast Guard officials said.

The Coast Guard estimated that 20 or 30 gallons of a heavy type of bunker fuel used by ships formed a horseshoe-shaped slick several hundred yards long Thursday night.

No oil came ashore, however, so beaches, harbors and wetlands were spared any harm. The spill did come within 100 yards of the state beach south of Warner Avenue.

“It was probably a mystery spill from a vessel that pumped its bilges,” said Mark Lewack, chief marine science technician for the Coast Guard. “It’s hard to say where it came from. There were no vessels in the area, and the vessels used by the platforms don’t use that type of oil. It might have come from Long Beach.”

Lewack said it was not crude oil, so it couldn’t have spilled from an offshore oil platform or pipeline.

On Friday morning, the patchy slick was floating between two oil platforms about 1 1/2 miles offshore and was headed out with the tide. An oil-industry cleanup team, Clean Coastal Waters of Long Beach, was hired by the Coast Guard to skim up the oil since the responsible party is unknown.

The cleanup was completed by 2 p.m.

“There’s only some residual sheen left,” Lewack said.

Initial estimates from fire officials Thursday night put the spill at about 100 gallons, but experts said it’s hard to guess the quantity, especially at night, because oil spreads very thin on water.

The entrance to the sensitive Bolsa Chica wetlands was nearby, but no oil reached it.

Last Feb. 7, about 400,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from the American Trader tanker off Huntington Beach, staining about 15 miles of coastline and shutting down some beaches for as long as five weeks.