HUNTINGTON BEACH : Specialists Study Puzzling Oil Seepage

Oil specialists from the city Fire Department are inspecting the grounds where a downtown building was demolished to determine why gallons of crude have seeped to the surface.

A bulldozer was finishing the demolition of a restaurant on Main Street at Walnut Avenue last Saturday when the operation got bogged down--literally.

The machinery was mired in muck as water and oil that mysteriously seeped from the ground transformed the site into a virtual marsh, witnesses said.

The bulldozer eventually freed itself from the muck, and the demolition is now complete. But work to prepare the site for a new commercial project--part of the city’s downtown redevelopment project--will be held up until the ground is stabilized.

The water, which flooded the site and soaked the adjacent sidewalk, came from a ruptured water line, which since has been capped, according to Michael Adams, the city’s community development director.

But the source of the oil remains a mystery, Adams said.

There are no abandoned oil wells in the vicinity, he said, noting that drilling has been banned within 1,000 feet of Main Street since oil was first discovered in the city in the 1920s.

But enough oil seeped to the surface to form a tarlike trough that witnesses estimated was 6 feet long, 2 feet wide and at least 2 feet deep.

“It was this big blob of what appeared to be tar, but it was crude oil,” said downtown resident Guy Gazzardo, who discovered the oil while strolling Saturday morning. “It just oozed up out of the ground.”

The water and the oil made the ground so unstable “that you could feel the ground floating under you,” Gazzardo said. “It’s the first time I ever experienced anything like that. It felt like you were standing on a water bed.”

While fire officials try to figure out the origin of the oozing oil, Adams speculated that it may have been disposed of below the site years ago.

Many downtown residents, however, are skeptical. Doug Langevin said he wonders if the combination of oil and water might have escaped to the surface via an earthquake fault. The Newport-Inglewood fault runs just off the Huntington Beach coast, and several of its minor offshoot faults cut underneath the city.

Adams said he knows of no fault running underneath the site of the befuddling oil deposit. “And, if that were the case, you’d find methane gas . . . but not crude oil.”

After fire officials determine the source of the oil, they will devise a plan to stop the flow. New soil samples will be taken to make sure water or oil is no longer seeping, and the ground will be stabilized before the foundation is begun for the new development, Adams said.