Oil Team Tackles Simulated Spill : Environment: Successful cleanup exercise is the first conducted off the California coast.

The alarm went out just shy of dawn Wednesday, soon after oil company workers dumped 15 tons of rice hulls into the choppy Santa Barbara channel to simulate a 105,000-gallon oil spill.

Within two hours, crews aboard oil cleanup boats churned out of Santa Barbara and Port Hueneme harbors to corral the mock slick--and to learn whether they are ready to tackle the real thing.

Oil spill specialists, environmental officials and the U. S. Coast Guard joined in the exercise, which organizers said was the first simulated oil spill cleanup ever conducted off the California coast.

“I was impressed,” said Bill Dickerson, of the Marine Spill Response Corp., the nationwide, oil industry-backed cleanup company that coordinated the drill. “There were some rather large swells out there, and it wasn’t one of those beautiful days for working on the ocean.”

The biodegradable rice hulls--although meant to sink and be eaten by fish--”are not a perfect simulation” of floating oil, said Skip Onstad, general manager of MSRC’s regional center based in Port Hueneme. “But you get reasonably the same amount of anxiety here in an exercise as you do in a spill.”

Although the cleanup itself was going well by midday Wednesday, MSRC was still working some of the kinks out of its command structure and its computerized disaster plan, Onstad said.

“That’s what the whole exercise is about,” he said. “To stress the system and find out what goes well and what doesn’t go well, so we can hone our training and truly be ready to go into action,” he said.

MSRC was set up by a coalition of major oil companies in the wake of the catastrophic spill after the 1989 grounding of the Exxon Valdez off the Alaska coastline. The Port Hueneme office is the first of five regional response teams that ultimately will be scattered around the coastlines of the United States. Onstad’s crew is responsible for handling catastrophic spills along the entire West Coast and Hawaii.

Until this week, the company’s cleanup crews had been training in inlets around Southern California and in MSRC’s 60,000-gallon training pool inside a warehouse at the Port of Hueneme, taking their time to learn how to separate oil from water.

On Wednesday they charged across the windy channel toward the simulated spill in what eventually grew to a flotilla of 17 boats.

The MSRC rookies were joined by more experienced workers from Clean Seas--a Santa Barbara cleanup cooperative set up by the petroleum industry after the 1969 blowout of an offshore Santa Barbara well--and Clean Coastal Waters, a Los-Angeles based cooperative. These two cooperatives are responsible for smaller spills in their immediate areas.

As another boat spread more rice hulls about five miles offshore to simulate the slick’s steady spread, crews had already laid floating, neon-orange booms on the waters, herding the rice hulls toward boats with skimmers that would vacuum the stuff from the surface for later disposal.

Just southwest of Unocal’s Platform Gina, a new, blue, 208-foot MSRC vessel named the California Responder tugged one end of a floating yellow boom around a beige smear of rice. A tiny aluminum support boat, carried to the site and launched by crane from the Responder, held the boom’s other end.

Several thousand feet away, the Clean Seas boat, Mr. Clean II, plowed sluggishly through the swirled slick, skimmers hanging off of its gunwales like rickety wings to suck the rice hulls off the water’s surface.

Nearby, the Dash and the Dawn, two smaller boats, dragged the ends of a V-shaped boom over another patch of floating rice.

Observers from the region’s seven largest oil companies--Texaco, Chevron, Exxon, Unocal, Chevron, Shell, BP and Arco--bobbed around on a twin-hulled observation boat as cleanup workers attacked the slick.

Back in the Port Hueneme control room, MSRC workers hunkered intently over Macintosh computer data readouts on the slick, and huddled with government officials in MSRC’s chart-lined briefing room.

In the company’s parking lot, TRW technicians tested out an aerial slick-tracking system, scrutinizing colorized computer maps that showed microwave scans of the slick taken by an airplane that was buzzing the spill site.

Shortly before 11 a.m.--just five hours after the fictitious XYZ Oil Co. first reported the spill to Clean Seas and set the massive drill in motion--cleanup coordinators held a strategy briefing.

Wind, wave conditions, chemical tests and civil preparedness plans--all were laid out on the table in detail. The MSRC staff reviewed all possible effects they thought the spill could have--from oil-soaked birds and tourists’ complaints about tar on the beach to the ecological harm to seals at the Channel Islands and Indian burial grounds near Mugu Lagoon.

Mark Weller, a Texaco official playing the part of the XYZ Oil representative, gave out a fake 800 number for citizens to call for information on the spill--800-XYZ-SPIL.

The type of work done in Wednesday’s drill could have put “a sizable dent” in the 1969 Santa Barbara spill, but there is no telling what it could have done in the 11-million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster, he said.

“We had to create something that was a plausible example” of what could happen in the Santa Barbara Channel, Weller said. “The focus should be on not spilling oil, but if something like this happens, we have a very good capability to handle it.”