Slick Response : Mock Oil Spill Near Santa Barbara Tests Cleanup Crews’ Readiness

The alarm went out Wednesday just shy of dawn as 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, oil cleanup crews were dispatched out of Santa Barbara and Port Hueneme harbors to corral the mock slick--made of biodegradable rice hulls--and to learn whether they have what it takes 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 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 rice hulls, meant to sink and become fish food, “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 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,” he said.

MSRC was set up by a coalition of major oil companies in the wake of the catastrophic 1989 spill from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. The Port Hueneme crew, responsible for handling spills off the West Coast and Hawaii, is the first of five regional response teams that will be scattered along U.S. coastlines.

Until this week, the company’s cleanup crews had been training in inlets around Southern California and in MSRC’s 60,000-gallon pool inside a warehouse at the Port of Hueneme, learning 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 following the 1969 blowout of an offshore Santa Barbara well--and Clean Coastal Waters, a Los Angeles-based cooperative.

As another boat spread more rice hulls about five miles offshore to simulate the slick’s steady spread, crews set out floating, neon-orange booms on the water, herding the rice hulls toward boats with skimmers that vacuum the stuff from the surface.

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

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

In the company’s parking lot, TRW technicians tested an aerial slick-tracking system, scrutinizing colorized computer maps that showed microwave scans of the slick taken from an airplane 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 were laid out in detail. The MSRC staff reviewed all possible effects they thought the spill could have, from damage to 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.

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 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.”