BAY JIMMY, La. — Crews on fishing boats with giant vacuums sucked up pools of oil near a small Louisiana barrier island Tuesday as officials sought to reassure residents that the cleanup continues even though no crude has leaked in two months.
Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, who is overseeing the cleanup, said about 23,000 workers are still employed in the effort, about 80 percent of them in Louisiana.
No oil has leaked from the BP PLC well in the Gulf of Mexico since July 15. The well was declared dead Sunday after engineers pumped in cement to stop up the bottom.
While oil has not been gushing into the Gulf, it continues to move ashore on coastal islands and wetlands in Louisiana. Local officials are worried that cleanup efforts won’t be maintained to catch as much of it as possible.
Last week, BP said it was ending a program that employed boat captains as scouts for oil in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.
The company called the vessels-of-opportunity program a success, although it was criticized for hiring recreational boats and out-ofstate craft while some local commercial boats sat idle.
The boats looked for oil on the coast and helped in the cleanup by skimming for oil and deploying oil barriers.
Later Tuesday, Zukunft said during a conference call that crews continue to respond to pockets of oil washing up along 600 miles of coastline. Besides oil in marshes and on beaches, officials also are focused on monitoring what is below the surface of the water, he said.
While acknowledging that oil continues to wash ashore in some areas, Zukunft and other Coast Guard officials said that marsh grasses appeared to be recovering. Oil making its way to shore is lighter and sparser.
The BP-leased rig Deepwater Horizon exploded off the Louisiana coast on the night of April 20, killing 11 workers and setting off a spill that ultimately led to more than 4.8 million barrels of oil spewing from BP’s undersea well. A barrel is 42 gallons.
Crude first washed ashore near the mouth of the Mississippi River on April 29. It fouled marshes, caused the closure of fishing grounds and sparked an environmental debate over long-term effects of oil in the water and at the bottom of the Gulf.
So far, BP said, the effort to shut down the well and clean up the spill has cost $9.5 billion, not including a $20 billion fund that the London-based company established to handle claims fromindividuals and businesses claiming damage from the spill.
On Tuesday, Zukunft reflected on the cleanup effort.
“If youwere here in June or July, you’d have been in thick black oil,” Zukunft said as the fishing boat he was aboard floated on what appeared to be oil-free water.
Zukunft estimated that about 900 craft in the vessels-of-opportunity program are still operating in Louisiana waters, deploying booms where needed or hauling in booms that are damaged or contaminated with oil. He said it was too early to estimate when or how quicklythat number would be reduced, saying it will depend on the weather, and the condition and amount of oil that comes in.
The oil-spill effect was still evident in some places. Strands of absorbent booms washed inland by rough weather littered the edge of an island that had dead, brown grass lining its perimeter.
Zukunft’s tour came a day after the Unified Area Command that was formed in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill announced that it was consolidating command posts in Houma, La., and Mobile, Ala., into a single Gulf Coast Incident Management Team in New Orleans.
Zukunft said that would result in a staff reduction of about 1,800 people.
Information for this article was contributed by Harry R. Weber of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 09/22/2010