BP still removing oil from Gulf Coast beaches

EAST GRAND TERRE ISLAND, La. - Dig 2 feet into the sand on this wind-swept beach and up comes the foul smell of oil.

The unmistakable whiff of crude eight months after the BP spill is one of the last in-your-face reminders of the long, tainted summer on the Gulf Coast.

For months, in what BP calls Operation Deep Clean, crews have been scouring the Gulf Coast's sandy shores for oil - digging, scraping, tilling and sifting beach after beach.

But it's unlikely they will get all of it by the time college students begin flocking to the Gulf Coast for spring break at the end of February, the Coast Guard's deadline for cleaning bathing beaches. There is so much oil under the sand, mud and oyster shells that tar balls may be washing up for months, if not years.

"This process goes on and on over time," said Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University chemist who has analyzed the spill for the federal government. "You clean them up, they come back, you clean them up."

The Coast Guard says 928 miles of beach were fouled with oil and fewer than 30 miles are left to clean.

Yet on this stretch of befouled Louisiana coast - a bird sanctuary, not a bathing beach - the cleanup seems far from over. On East Grand Terre, workers in orange safety vests use backhoes and mechanical augers to dig up the sand, which is sifted and resifted by machines with conveyor belts and screens.

"You definitely smell it. It hits you in the face," said Toney Edison, a BP cleanup worker.

The cleanup is of little help to people like Sheryl Lindsay, whose beach wedding business in Orange Beach, Ala., has tanked.

"We have seven weddings booked. Normally at this time of year I would have at least 30 on the books," Lindsay said. Lindsay said her business is doomed, and she is trying to sell it. "They destroyed our lives. "