Oil Siphoned From Puerto Rico Barge : Spill: Crews seek to limit contamination. Tourism officials send out videotapes of unharmed coast to travel agents to enhance the area’s image.

Salvage workers continued their efforts Sunday to siphon oil from a leaking barge that ran aground near a major tourist area.

At the same time, crews armed with skimmers and vacuum pumps worked to clean three miles of beachfront blackened by the spill.

“I think the cleanup is going remarkably well for the magnitude of the accident,” said Gov. Pedro Rossello, who added that he thought the spill had caused only a “temporary setback” to Puerto Rican tourism.

To minimize the spill’s effects on the image of this U. S. commonwealth, tourism officials are sending videotapes to media outlets and travel wholesalers on the Mainland, emphasizing that beachfronts of only two tourist hotels in San Juan were severely sullied by oil.

At least half of the 1.5 million gallons of fuel oil aboard the Morris J. Berman spilled onto the sands and lagoons in the Condado area early Friday after a tow line broke and the 302-foot-long barge smashed into the rocks, rupturing its hull.

To mitigate the effects on the environment, as well as to stop further contamination, cleanup crews quickly threw containment booms into a lagoon directly south of the stricken barge.

Hundreds of workers outfitted in white plastic suits almost immediately began sopping up the oil with everything from blotting mops to conveyor belts that pull the sludge from the water.

Workers late Saturday began pumping the remaining oil from the barge into a second barge towed into place nearby.

Coast Guard Cmdr. Robert Ross said 358,000 gallons of combined oil and water had been pumped out of the leaking barge by Sunday afternoon. The disabled barge should be emptied by today, he said.

Sunny skies and balmy temperatures made the cleanup operation a popular Sunday attraction, with scores of residents watching workers and small boats plod through the thick oil. Traffic in the area was jammed as some motorists pulled to the sides of the road to look.

At sea, two westward-drifting oil slicks were being attacked just north of San Juan by the Coast Guard’s Gulf Strike Team from Mobile, Ala.

Using special skimming equipment aboard a tug boat, the team collected some of the oil Saturday, but they were unable to work Sunday because of high seas, according to Coast Guard Petty Officer Toni Long-Gay.

A spokesman for the company that was operating the barge said cleanup expenses were running about $1 million a day. The effort to rid the shoreline of all traces of the spill would be a “long and costly process,” said Pedro Rivera, general manager of the Bunker Group of Puerto Rico.

The Coast Guard, which is overseeing the operation, estimated a full cleanup would take at least three weeks.

The commonwealth government has filed a federal lawsuit charging the Bunker Group and the owner of the barge, New Jersey-based New England Marine Service, with negligence.