Sand Shark scours Panhandle for tar balls , but is it too good ?

By Kevin Spear

BP’s contract crews marched on to Pensacola Beach, picking up tar balls by hand, but the national seashore’s supervisors kept heavy equipment away until this year’s turtle- and bird-nesting seasons were mostly over.

Now, hundreds of laborers are digging up and removing tar balls by hand. Morris said the crews are much more effective now that the weather has cooled and the workers are more expert at ferreting out buried oil.

He pointed to Daryl Pitts, a laborer from Pensacola, who had just zeroed in on a small spot of otherwise ordinary-looking beach and was exhuming pancake-sized lumps of crude from a hole about 12 inches deep.

Jason Bragg, who is directing BP’s mechanical removal of tar balls from Panhandle beaches, said the Sand Shark isn’t a “rocket ship.” But it’s thorough, removing all objects larger than 3 millimeters — about the width of three pinheads, he said. The 11-foot-tall machine weighs 35,000 pounds, moves at up to two miles an hour, requires a crew of six to 10 people, and in a pair of 10-hour shifts can clean a strip of sand 8 feet wide and 1.5 miles long, Bragg said.

Daniel Brown, Gulf Island National Seashore’s park superintendent, said his staff is having an intense debate about how deep the Sand Shark should be allowed to operate.

“Our concern is we don’t do more harm by removing oil,” he said. “To us, beaches are a lot more than sand and water.”

The first few feet of sand contains crabs, insects and organic material that provide fundamental support for a beach’s ecology, he said. And yet, when survey crews bored 408 holes in the seven miles of park seashore known as Fort Pickens, 27 percent of them contained oil as deep as 2 feet below the surface.

Brown said his staff is considering letting the Sand Shark operate at its maximum 18 inches in the most popular swimming areas but only at a 6-inch depth along the park’s more-natural stretches of beach.

“I can see this going on for a long time,” Brown said. “The beaches are not going to get cleaned up in 2010, and probably not in 2011.”

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