PORT HUENEME : Oil-Spill Center Nearly Half-Finished

Directors of a major oil spill cleanup center at the Port of Hueneme gave an area congressman and news reporters a sneak peek Thursday at the $60-million operation, which is nearly halfway completed.

General Manager Skip Onstad said the Pacific Southwest Regional Response Center will be ready by Feb. 18, 1993, to handle an oil spill about the size that leaked from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989.

So far, the center at the commercial Port of Hueneme has hired 44 people for its anticipated 55-member staff, chartered a 160-foot oil boat for testing oil-containment booms and is refurbishing a warehouse for its base of operations, Onstad said.

The Port of Hueneme center is one of five regional oil cleanup centers in the United States financed by a consortium of big oil companies. The coalition, organized as the Marine Spill Response Corp., is building a fleet of 16 boats to be dispersed at ports nationwide.

One of the 210-foot vessels will be docked at the Port of Hueneme so it has ready access to the center’s equipment, tanker traffic heading for Los Angeles from Alaska and the offshore oil platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel.

Onstad said the vessel will be large enough to include space for 38 people, a helicopter landing pad, and thousands of feet of floating oil-containment booms and skimmers to remove the oil from the ocean’s surface. “It will be an offshore command and control center,” Onstad said.

Onstad cautioned that oil cleanup is not a perfected science and that all spills of toxic petroleum products cause damage. “A spill is just like a brush fire,” he said. “There is going to be environmental damage. We are just the forces to fight the spill.”

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), who arranged for the tour, said he was impressed with the center’s program. “This is not going to be a cure-all,” Gallegly said. “But it will play a significant role in minimizing a spill.”

In addition to its own cleanup team, Onstad said the center plans to train California fishermen to help with a major spill, expanding a program that he started at Clean Seas, an oil cleanup cooperative based in Carpinteria.

The center has hired Brian Jenison, former head of the Ventura County Fishermen’s Assn., to help establish a statewide network of fishermen to become a volunteer force ready to combat catastrophic spills.