Baja Oil Spill Appears to Pose No U.S. Threat

The oil slick left after a spill off Baja California began to dissipate Saturday and its remnants did not appear to pose any further danger to the shoreline, Coast Guard officials said Saturday.

The slick, about the size of a football field, was moving south at about half a mile per hour, away from the spot where a pipeline broke as a tanker was pumping oil to an onshore facility. The spill occurred about 1 1/2 miles off the coast near Rosarito, a resort town about 30 miles south of the border.

“It could still move northward, but right now it really looks like it’s going away” from San Diego, said a Coast Guard spokesman.

Still, tar balls of unknown origin washed up on a California beach north of the Tijuana Estuary, which is home to two species of endangered birds. The Coast Guard said it could not tell if the tar came from the spill.

Throughout Saturday, Coast Guard, state Department of Fish and Game and U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials were ready with emergency plans in case the slick invaded U.S. waters, and had a cleanup strategy prepared in case the oil reached the beach.

Free-floating oil did reach a stretch of the sparsely populated beach near Rosarito.

The pipeline failure was reported Thursday afternoon.

The Mexican military, backed by Advanced Cleanup Technologies Inc., a U.S. firm, began working to clean the Mexican beach Friday. Dozens of bags of oil-soaked debris were carted off, and officials hoped that the residue left on the beach will be burned away by the sun.

The cleanup firm worked at soaking up the free-floating oil left in the water, and by Saturday afternoon a spokesman said that only the main slick remained a potential problem.