SITE OF THE NEW CARISSA — Chunks and bits of hardened oil washed up on the beach near the New Carissa shipwreck Friday morning.

An inspector cruising the beach on an all-terrain vehicle noticed the tar clumps at about 7:30 a.m. Friday. State officials were quick to announce it was not gooey oil. But it was oil — old, cold crusty cakes that likely had been lodged in the sand under the stern. Most of the chunks were solid, but some pieces had softer material on the inside.

“I noticed there were some tar balls with a sheen on the wet sand,” said Randy Henry said.

He’s the guy with National Response Corporation Environmental Services who’s been hired to scrutinize the beach and surf for pollution related to the demolition operation. Henry said the line of chunks were scattered down the high tide line for about 160 yards.

“The stuff is mostly inert,” Henry said. “Just a few pieces are leaving a sheen.”

The balls vary in size from one quarter-inch to 6 inches in size.

“You’re not going to have animals eating this stuff. If they touch them, it’s not going to coat them,” said Garrett Wickham, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s on-scene coordinator.

Wickham said over the decade since the New Carissa ran aground in the North Spit surf, the lighter components of any oil that remained have evaporated. The heavy stuff solidified and sunk. It’s almost like loose asphalt that will break in your hands.

But a few clumps were leaving a sheen and an estimated 3 to 4 liters of material washed up on the beach.

Prior to Friday, beach watchers had found only two tar chunks in the past several weeks as Titan Salvage began dragging up the Carissa. When Henry saw Friday’s release, he quickly called in the Coos Bay Oil Response Cooperative team at about 8:15 a.m. The six team members fanned out on the beach by around 9:30 a.m., picking up the pieces.

“We show up with our gear ready to go,” said Doug Eberlein, the Coos Bay team’s coordinator.

Eberlein said they hadn’t picked up a large amount of material Friday. But more is expected to wash up with the active surf in the next few days. Henry’s company had a crew driving down from Portland on Friday to relieve the Coos Bay responders.

The dry sand areas of the North Spit are off-limits this time of year anyway, while threatened snowy plovers are nesting. Oregon Natural Heritage Information Center Biologists Dave Lauten and Kathy Castelein were on site Friday morning, checking on eight plover broods. Five are on the beach, three are in the nesting areas, they said.

Lauten and Castelein make the trip to the North Spit every other day to check on the birds. They also were around in 1999, and worked with Henry when the New Carissa first went aground on Feb. 4 that year.

Now, though, instead of cleaning birds, they’re happy with the progress.

“We looked at other migrating shorebirds and gulls,” Castelein said.

“Everybody looks clean.”

The principal plover area starts about a mile south of the Carissa demolition area and runs down to about the North Jetty. The beach closure for plover breeding ends Sept. 15.

The section of beach next to the New Carissa work site where the material is washing up will remain closed as the team searches for and collects the clumps with shovels.

Long before Titan sunk the legs of its salvage barges in sand on either side of the shipwreck, the state came up with an oil spill response plan. The beach crew followed that plan Friday morning, said Julie Curtis, the communications manager for the Oregon Department of State Lands.

Henry believes the tar pieces likely are left from the attempt to burn the New Carissa’s remaining fuel almost 10 years ago.

“(The surf) is breaking it and chopping it up and bringing it ashore,” he said.

Curtis said state officials consider it a minor incident, but this might not be the end of it. The NRC clean-up crew will be out there at least through the weekend, waiting through the tide cycle just in case more debris washes ashore.

— Staff Writer Susan Chambers contributed to this report.