Officials Say Spill Cleanup 95% Over : Oxnard: McGrath Lake is blue again and birds have returned to swim in the water.

Midway through the third week of cleanup of Ventura County’s worst oil spill, about 95% of the oil has been recovered and state officials said they expect to sop up most of the rest within a week.

“We’re working on the last 2% to 5% now, and that last part is the hardest,” said Robin Lewis, an environmental specialist with the state Department of Fish and Game.

State and oil company officials say the cleanup of the 84,000 gallons of spilled crude oil is progressing so well that they were able to reopen Harbor Boulevard in Oxnard.

The cleanup is a joint effort of the U.S. Coast Guard, the state Department of Fish and Game, and Berry Petroleum Co., parent company of Bush Oil, whose ruptured pipeline caused the spill.

“When I first saw this, it was black--you didn’t see ripples,” said Berry Petroleum spokesman Ray Hatch as he inspected McGrath Lake, where the bulk of the oil spilled. “It looks good. The birds are back, and I’m glad to see that.”

The 10-acre lake is blue again and birds are swimming in the water. Nearby McGrath State Beach, which was closed during part of the cleanup, has been reopened, and the petroleum smell that once pervaded the air has dissipated.

However, state officials said they did not know when the cleanup will be declared over.

At the height of the cleanup, about 500 workers were driving bulldozers, clearing tarred brush and scooping oil off the sand, Hatch said. Now that number has dwindled to about 100. Dozens of frontloaders, cranes and other heavy equipment have been removed, as have the 13 boats used to skim oil off the ocean.

Still waiting to be removed are huge mounds of oily sand and about 70 dumpsters full of oil-covered brush and debris.

While McGrath Lake has been cleared of almost all oil, Hatch said, workers still must trim oil-covered reeds around the lake this week. Nearly all the oil has been removed from the shoreline and the drainage ditch that feeds the lake, officials said.

“Every spill has its own personality and there’s always lessons to be learned and surprises,” Lewis said. For example, workers have had a harder time than expected cleaning the drainage ditch, and some crews working in that area have contracted poison oak.

Hatch’s company is responsible for the cleanup costs, which state officials said may reach $10 million. He agreed that few glitches have occurred so far.

“The biggest crisis we had was on Christmas Day,” Hatch said. “We couldn’t get portable potties out there. There were some upset people.”

But Hatch noted that if local public agencies had responded faster to the spill, the cleanup task would not have been as extensive.

“We would have been done by now,” he said.

At least seven local public safety agencies were contacted about a beachcomber’s report of an oil spill a day before the formal alarm was sounded Christmas morning. None sent an investigator to check the report, allowing hundreds more barrels of oil to escape.

Local officials said each agency assumed--or was told--that another would follow up.

Officials investigating the spill have said that oil may have been seeping from the ruptured pipe for as much as three days before the leak was discovered.

As of last week, 188 animals--mostly birds--were dead and 32 were injured, Hatch said. Updated figures of wildlife losses were not available, he said.

Biologists said the spill at McGrath Lake could end up affecting wildlife and wetland habitats at the Santa Clara River estuary, less than a mile north of the spill.

The endangered least tern, which is wintering farther south and has not yet been affected by the spill, nests at the estuary and probably at the lake.

The area also supports pelicans, herons, egrets and snowy plovers, among other birds.

Don Davis, vice president of the Ventura Audubon Society, praised officials on the cleanup but said it may take years for the area to recover.

“There’s a lot of damage that has been done that no one has accounted for entirely yet,” Davis said. “I don’t think we really understand all the damage that has been done to the lake and the area around the lake.”

Officials are developing plans for restoration of the area, which would begin after the cleanup is finished. Biologists are trying to determine what types of wildlife and plant species will need to be replanted, Hatch said.