A thunderous assembly of corkscrews, conveyor belts and vibrating screens is devouring the coastline inch by inch, spitting out fluffed and nearly flawlessly clean sand in its wake.
The rolling machine can actually be a little too effective, which alarms ecologists, who treasure the Panhandle’s beaches as something more than outdoor sets for sunbathing. But the truck-sized “Sand Shark” is widely considered the best way of digging up and removing the crude oil deposited here this summer during the nation’s worst offshore-drilling disaster.
In a region still in shock over the financial and psychological damage inflicted by BP PLC’s months-long oil spill, the act of watching and listening to the Sand Shark at work is for many a mesmerizing form of therapy.
“It’s amazing,” said Terry Morris, an oil-spill-response coordinator for Gulf Shores National Seashore, which abuts both ends of Pensacola Beach’s commercial strip of hotels and restaurants. “It leaves the sand as clean as a golf-course sand trap.”
Businesses on or near Pensacola Beach and its neighbor Perdido Key depend on a surge of tourism each year from May to September. But this summer, as the “world’s whitest beaches” were paved black with BP crude, the number of visitors plunged.
In July 2009, for example, about 470,000 vehicles came through the toll booths of Bob Sikes Bridge headed to Pensacola Beach. This year’s July count fell to about 425,000 — and a large share of those weren’t tourists but part of an army of oil-spill responders.
W.A. “Buck” Lee, the highly visible and vocal executive director of the Santa Rosa Island Authority — a sort of city hall for unincorporated Pensacola Beach — is determined to push next year’s July tollbridge count to a half-million. To make that happen, the beaches need to be clean beyond doubt, and that will require a fleet of Sand Sharks, Lee said.
“This is the only machine I’ve seen that truly works,” he said.
A BP technical team designed the first $300,000 Sand Shark, and VT LeeBoy Inc. of North Carolina is fabricating the machines.
The first arrived in Florida in August and is now working the national seashore. Another went to work last week on Perdido Key, near the Florida-Alabama state line. Three more are expected to start sifting through beaches in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi by the end of the month.
Lee wishes they were all in Pensacola Beach — and dialed up to their mostaggressive mode of operation. For now, though, authorities are restricting the Sand Sharks’ operators from digging deeper than 6 inches, citing federal rules that protect historic and archeological features.
But the machines can chew through sand 18 inches deep, and Lee points out to anybody who will listen that, whenever the beach’s sand is replenished — as it was in 2005 — federal authorities require that the rebuilt beach be plowed to a depth of 24 inches once a year for three years, to ensure the sand is soft enough for turtle nesting.
“The federal government requires that, but the federal government doesn’t know that it requires that,” Lee said, exasperated by what he regards as bureaucratic bungling in response to the oil spill.
Even after Sand Sharks have plowed the full 8 miles of Pensacola Beach, Lee is going to press BP to pay for dredging up thousands of tons of additional sugar sand from a few miles offshore and spreading it along the shoreline — an act he hopes will bury a bad memory.
“We have to win back the confidence of tourists,” Lee said.
For the most part, the sand along Pensacola Beach’s hotel strip appears free of oil. The relatively few tar balls still visible in the surf zone range in size and shape from grapes to hamburger patties. And those are so infused with sand that they are not nearly as greasy or as likely to stain as when the first waves came ashore in midsummer.
Bill and Susie Setchel of Sarasota, out for a morning stroll last week, said they had visited Pensacola Beach a few years ago and so decided to come back for a look at one of their favorite coastlines.
“We still think this is still quite lovely,” he said. “Such beautiful sand.”
A few feet away but nearly invisible beneath its coating of sand was a hardened tar ball the size of a peanut shell.
Tons of tar balls are found by people who are trained to look for them. Orlando native Joyce Riesinger works for the state Department of Environmental Protection in the Panhandle. Every morning, she joins one of the many teams comprised of state, BP and Coast Guard personnel for what amounts to precise beachcombing. She said the highest parts of the beach are often the cleanest. The lower portions, including dips and depressions, are filled with the ribbons, mats and balls of tar that came ashore months ago.
“The beach profile kind of directed that,” said Riesinger, whose maps and technical reports are used to direct cleanup efforts.
While driving through the park, Morris, a former chief law-enforcement ranger at Gulf Shores National Seashore, recalled the oil slick’s arrival on a nighttime high tide in late June. Little cleanup took place the next day, and that evening, a new high tide buried the oil beneath fresh sand. That was followed by storms and several days of strong winds that piled even more sand on BP’s crude.
“It was the worst time oil could have hit us,” Morris said.
Eventually, BP contract crews marched on to Pensacola Beach, picking up tar balls by hand, but the national seashore’s supervisors kept heavy equipment out till this year’s bird-and turtle-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.
On another section of the park’s shore, the Sand Shark was doing the work of at least 30 Daryl Pittses.
Jason Bragg, 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 one-half 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 7 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.”
But along less-natural stretches of Pensacola Beach, there is much agreement that the Sand Shark should be unleashed to do its most voracious work possible.
Enid Sisskin, a Pensacola resident and longtime advocate for a drilling ban in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida, thinks removing the oil is an important public-health issue.
Escambia County Commissioner Grover Robinson, whose district includes Pensacola Beach, said the area’s economy depends on it.
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