SANTA PAULA : Crews Toil to Clean Up Oil Spread by Rain

Cleanup crews trudged two miles down a mucky dirt road Sunday, dodging rattlesnakes and hauling 25 pounds of equipment apiece, before they began the grubby, painstaking work of mopping up oil.

But despite the obstacles, nearly two dozen workers labored from dawn to dusk, scouring the Santa Paula backcountry for every last wisp of an estimated 30,000 gallons that leaked two weeks ago from a Unocal tank into the Adams Canyon Barranca.

“It’s all hoof and huff and mopping up everything that’s around,” worker Howard Paxton said during a lunch break taken just yards from a pile of oil-coated debris.

The spill occurred when a storage tank containing light crude and oil overflowed into the barranca. Recent seismic activity prompted a surge in the oil that seeps from century-old tunnels in Adams Canyon, overwhelming the small tank, company officials said.

Aware of the leak, Unocal officials said they immediately sent out cleanup crews, who almost scrubbed the barranca clean in eight days of intensive work. Then the rains hit over the weekend, flushing the lingering light crude down the swollen barranca and into the Santa Clara River, which flows straight to the Pacific Ocean.

Frustrated and weary, the crews had to fan out again Saturday and Sunday, hiking along the barranca and river to sweep up the remains of a spill they thought that they had contained.

“We had put in a lot of hours of manpower and had it almost all done until the rains came and washed the rest of the oil all over the place,” Unocal utility worker Mike Burns said. “Mother Nature just said, ‘Hey, I’m bigger than you guys.’ ”

After several hours in the trenches, Burns pronounced the barranca mostly clean Sunday afternoon, although he acknowledged that it could take days, or weeks, to remove every speck of crude.

A few clots of oil might have floated into the Pacific, he said, and some pools along the way still shimmered with oil’s trademark rainbow sheen.

But for the most part, Burns said his crews had contained the contaminant.

Still, as always with oil spills, workers said the last few gallons would prove the toughest to capture.

“We might be here for four days or four weeks until we pass inspection,” said Joaquin Lopez, a cleanup worker with Lindsey Grading & Excavation in Santa Paula.

“It was all clean, but then the rain messed things up and now we’ve found some spots that are ugly.”