Crude Awakening : Spill: Oil that leaked from equipment near Solimar Beach Colony reaches the ocean and leads to a swift Conoco cleanup effort.

Riding her bike at 6:45 Tuesday morning, Barbara Bradley saw a disaster in the making: A 10-foot-wide swath of black crude oil was snaking down a barranca at Solimar Beach Colony, oozing onto the beach and heading toward the open sea.

Bradley, a resident of the gated community a mile north of Ventura, noticed a handful of men by Rincon Parkway and flagged them down. Workers from a nearby Conoco pumping facility were tracking a leak and weren’t aware that the oil--an estimated 420 to 840 gallons--had reached the ocean.

“They didn’t know how bad it was,” Bradley said, “and when I showed them, they said, ‘Better call the big guys in.’ ”

Less than half an hour later, the big guys were on the scene. Bob Chase, commander of Conoco’s 25-member emergency cleanup team, was at the beach at 7:10 to begin the operation. Chase also called in a 15-man crew from RMR Inc., a private Santa Maria cleanup company, and Clean Seas, a seagoing oil spill cleanup cooperative based in Carpinteria.

Within an hour, 40 men clad in disposable white coveralls, hard hats and rubber boots were sweeping absorbent booms along the beach for a few hundreds yards north and south of the barranca. A quarter of a mile out to sea, four Clean Seas boats corralled a small oil slick by dragging a 200-foot plastic boom and scooped the oil from the surface oil-skimming machine. The boat’s choreography was directed from a helicopter that scouted for patches of oil.

By early afternoon, the beach and the ocean had been cleared of oil. “I was very impressed with the response and how fast they cleaned things up,” Bradley said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

But the creek bed was still a gooey mess from the beach inland for about a quarter of a mile. As a backhoe scooped out a sump, workers laid plastic into the hole and prepared to flush the barranca with water. Two trucks with vacuums were on hand to suck the oil from the sump before workers ventured into the barranca with shovels to remove the remaining oil.

“The majority of the cleanup will be done by this afternoon,” Chase said.

Chase said he believed the leak was caused by a faulty seal in a pump connected to an oil-transfer line about half a mile from the beach. The exact cause won’t be known until an investigation is completed, he said. Although the pump had an automatic shut-off mechanism, “the leak was so small the pump did not shut down automatically,” Chase said.

The stream of crude oil apparently didn’t cause serious environmental damage and no wildlife was affected, said Heidi Togstad, a marine biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game.

“It looks like the oil was pretty well contained in the barranca,” she said.

The spill automatically triggers an investigation by Fish and Game officials who will look into the cause of the accident and search for negligence. Depending on the outcome of the investigation, Conoco could face fines ranging from $25,000 to $500,000, a Fish and Game spokesman said.

At least one Solimar homeowner was concerned about the environmental damage. “They (the cleanup crew) made a great effort,” said Sandi Carter, who lives next to the creek. “But you always feel like they didn’t get it all. I don’t think the barranca will ever be back the way it was.”

Tuesday’s oil leak was five miles south of the 1991 Southern Pacific train wreck that spilled hundreds of gallons of toxic hydrazine over a wide area in the beachfront community of Seacliff.