Setbacks Slow Cleanup of Huge Oil Spill : Environment: Unocal and state agencies deny charges that they have bungled the massive project near a beach in San Luis Obispo County.

What was once a beautiful sandy beach is now a huge pit of tainted water, dubbed Lake Unocal by cleanup crews. Nearby, enough contaminated sand has been piled in giant mounds to fill a line of dump trucks 67 miles long.

These are the signs of progress in the massive effort to clean up California’s biggest oil spill--which Unocal Corp. has admitted was the result of leaking underground pipes and mismanagement at its Guadalupe oil field south of San Luis Obispo.

But despite the company’s $12-million commitment to the emergency effort, the month-old cleanup has suffered a series of setbacks--including the discovery of three times as much contaminated sand as originally expected. Now, the project has fallen so far behind schedule it is threatened by coming winter storms.

Local officials, the Sierra Club and other environmental critics contend that the cleanup has been bungled by Unocal and the government agencies overseeing it: the U.S. Coast Guard and the state Department of Fish and Game.

They maintain that the cleanup method being used will not remove all the contamination from the beach and could cause greater problems by damaging nearby sand dunes. Some critics contend that it represents the worst blemish on Gov. Pete Wilson’s environmental record during his four years in office.

“I’m convinced that the cure is worse than the disease, and I believe it is because of political motivations that this cure was chosen,” said San Luis Obispo County Supervisor Bud Laurent, a former biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game.

But state and federal officials maintain that the emergency cleanup has been a success so far and deny that politics has played any part in the operation.

They concede that there is no way that they can meet their original Oct. 15 deadline for cooking the oil out of the sand, putting the clean sand back in the pit and installing a permanent underground barrier to stop pollution from reaching the ocean.

But they say their aggressive effort to dig up the plume of petroleum thinner that once flowed under the beach has succeeded in preventing the kind of leaks into the ocean that have plagued the site for at least eight years.

“You’ve got to get this stuff out of the environment and keep it from entering marine waters,” said Fish and Game lawyer Steve Sawyer. “We would think the rapid removal of the material would be the environmentalist position.”

Added state Resources Agency spokesman Andy McLeod: “Nobody has proposed any other alternative to deal with the immediate threat. The idea that this (method of cleanup) could be done for political reasons is ludicrous.”

Along the Central Coast, there is widespread anger at Unocal for polluting the ocean and ground water at a variety of locations and then not telling the public. In some quarters, any action that Unocal takes is greeted with skepticism, if not outright hostility.

At the aging oil field amid the Guadalupe dunes, Unocal has admitted leaking as much as 8.5 million gallons of diluent, a petroleum thinner used to help pump heavy crude out of the ground.

“The diluent shouldn’t be there, and we’re justifiably criticized for the fact that it’s there,” said Unocal President John Imle in a telephone interview from Indonesia. “No matter how we try to fix it, there are going to be some people who are going to criticize it.”

Company officials have been embarrassed by revelations that employees failed to report spills as required by law and actively sought to cover up the incidents as far back as 1978.

Earlier this year, Unocal pleaded no contest to three misdemeanor pollution charges and was fined $1.5 million. The company apologized for its actions and promised to clean up the mess.

Unocal’s cover-up was disclosed after a lengthy investigation by the Department of Fish and Game. The state is suing Unocal for more than $500 million for spilling diluent into the ocean and ground water and then failing to take proper action.

“We stuck our neck out a long time ago to make people realize this is one of the biggest environmental cases of all time,” said Sawyer, the Fish and Game lawyer.

So far, 31 separate plumes of contamination have been found on the site.

Much of the spilled diluent is floating on ground water beneath the oil field. However, one plume that flows steadily to the ocean has been responsible for repeated marine spills dating back at least to 1986.

During winter storms, when the water table is high and waves wash away much of the beach sand, the plume of smelly petroleum fluid flows into the ocean, contaminating fish and posing a health hazard to people, state officials say.

Attempts to stop the migrating diluent, including construction of an underground barrier and the installation of wells on the beach to pump out the fluid, were unsuccessful.

After a series of spills in January and April, the U.S. Coast Guard, state officials and Unocal agreed that it was time to take emergency action to prevent further pollution of the ocean.

The first step was construction of an elliptical cofferdam 820 feet long and 250 feet across on the beach just above the high tide line. The dam was designed to cut off the leading edge of the diluent plume under the beach and keep out the ocean on one side and hold back the rest of the contaminated plume on the other.

Inside the cofferdam, crews and heavy equipment, working around the clock, dug down four feet below sea level to remove the sand and as much of the contamination as possible, creating a lake of tainted ground water. Last week, cleanup crews continued to skim diluent from the surface in an effort to remove as much contamination as possible.

The next step--which is just beginning--is to clean the sand using a process known as thermal desorption, in which the sand is heated in giant revolving kilns until the diluent is vaporized and burned.

A drawback to the process is that it can change the color of the sand, turning it pink, gray or black.

Once the sand is clean, it will be put back into the hole to hold in place a permanent 22-foot-deep underground wall made of plastic that is intended to block the flow of contaminated ground water.

Unable to meet their deadline of Saturday, officials are racing against time and hope to have enough clean sand to install the plastic wall by Nov. 15 in advance of storms that could wash out the temporary metal cofferdam.

The cleanup has been slowed by a number of factors, including the discovery of 220,000 tons of contaminated sand that had to be removed. Officials had expected just 75,000 tons. And the sand cookers, which were supposed to be in place Sept. 1, were still being assembled last week.

Cleanup officials encountered the wrath of environmentalists for their proposal to “borrow” sand from dunes near the site to install the underground wall. But they quickly backed off from that proposal and are now considering using dune sand only if it is needed in an emergency.

The Sierra Club, the local group Eco-SLO and other environmental critics have accused the Coast Guard and the Wilson Administration of rushing into the excavation without conducting proper environmental reviews and considering other cleanup options.

“They (Unocal officials) have given the regulatory agencies a menu choice of one: Dig it up or let us keep polluting,” said Michael Fischer, executive director of the State Coastal Conservancy. “Neither of those choices in our view is acceptable.”

Critics say that the heavy equipment used in the emergency cleanup has the potential of damaging sand dunes and that the operation has spread diluent into new areas of the oil field.

They also contend that the cleanup will not be effective because some residual amounts of contamination will remain in the excavated site. Some go so far as to suggest that continued ocean pollution should have been tolerated for the sake of doing a proper environmental review.

Instead, they say, the Wilson Administration went ahead with the current plan to give the appearance that it was acting quickly.

“This is the worst showing of the Wilson Administration on any environmental matter,” said Sierra Club attorney Mark Massara. “This is going to make the whole damage and spill worse than they originally were.”

Environmentalists find support for their point of view in a report done for San Luis Obispo County by the consulting firm Fugro West Inc., which concluded that some contaminated material would be left behind and eventually leak into the ocean.

“It is unlikely that the emergency remedial action, even if successful, will prevent further releases to the environment,” the report said.

However, Fugro chemist Rod Farrell said that the study was being misused by critics and that the amount of contaminated material that may be left on the beach is minute compared to what has been removed.

“They’re doing a very good job,” Farrell said. “There is a possibility of releasing very minor amounts. It has been a very successful project.”

Unocal, state and federal officials say the amount of environmental harm caused by the emergency cleanup is negligible compared to the damage that would have resulted from ocean pollution.

The remainder of the oil field pollution, which does not pose such an immediate threat, will be the subject of detailed environmental review before cleanup begins there, they said.

“I think it’s very unfortunate that gubernatorial politics is being brought into this,” said Imle, Unocal’s president. “I can’t imagine how Gov. Wilson could be seen as manipulating this, how he could have any blame or kudos either. It was a longstanding situation and he just happened to be governor.”