FOURCHON BEACH, La. (CN) - Tropical Storm Lee uncovered mats of tar and oil throughout the Gulf Coast this month when it kicked up waves and oil-soaked sand, remnants of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Miles of beaches were covered in tar balls. But a field inspector said BP jumped when he informed it.
"Good thing the oil is exposed," Forrest Travirca III, field inspector of the Wisner Donation portion of Fourchon Beach, said as he walked along with beach with a Courthouse News reporter. "We knew it was there and BP knew because we told them. Now they have to listen."
Travirca, who works for the nonprofit Wisner Donation trust, said that BP has done a good job cleaning up after Tropical Storm Lee.
"None of the oil is new. All of it arrived last summer," Travirca said. He scanned the brown sand, the clumps of tar balls and scars left from tar mats that have been dug out.
Red flags on sticks poke out of the sand every few feet, indicating the location of a new tar mat. In the distance in the Gulf, oil platforms jut out along the horizon.
"Mother Nature has a way of continuously covering and uncovering," Travirca said. He picked up a tar ball, broke it in half and put it to his nose.
"Smell that?" he said. "Smell the petroleum?"
Travirca said he came out after the storm on Sunday to do the post-storm survey and found the tar balls and tar mats. He notified BP and sent photos.
"Normal thing," Travirca said. "That's what we do."
BP came out the following Tuesday. It immediately increased the size of its cleanup crew from 15 to 100 people and brought in heavy equipment.
That stretch of beach is among the closest to BP's Macondo well, which broke in April 2010, leading to the explosion and fire aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, killing 11 workers and setting off the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Travirca said BP has improved its cleanup efforts since then. Its crew built roads along the beach so that only the road area is affected by the traffic and heavy machinery, not the entire beach.
Travirca said there is a lot of public misconception about tar mats and tar balls.
"Oil-encrusted sand was thrown up on the beach and we knew it was part of a mat," Travirca said.
The mats are pools of gooey oil that stick to the seafloor where the beach meets the water. Sand washes over them with time, hiding them. Strong waves during a tropical storm break off pieces of the tar mat and throw balls of tar onshore.
Until the tar mats are gone, the tar balls will appear. The only way to stop the tar balls is to find the mats and dig them out.
Before the oil spill, Wisner lost 43 feet of beachfront a year. Since the spill, the rate has increased because removal of the oil disrupted the natural compression of the sand, causing the looser sand to be more more susceptible to erosion, Travirca said.
Travirca said oil cleanup is a tradeoff. Digging out the mats, called "scouring," accelerates erosion.
In 1984 the beach extended 20 yards farther into the water than it does today.