Twenty years ago Sunday, Vic Leipzig picked up an oil-soaked grebe on the Huntington Beach coast — what he believes was the first bird rescued in the massive American Trader oil spill that blackened the beach, killed thousands of seabirds and hammered the beachside economy.

The hull of the oil tanker was torn open after it ran over its own anchor on Feb. 7, 1990, disgorging 400,000 gallons of crude into the ocean. Soon the oil reached the shoreline, rolling in with the waves.

“There was oil on the surface of the water, and the waves were crashing black onto the sand,” said Leipzig, a biology teacher at Golden West College, remembered as the anniversary approached. “It was a visually dramatic sight.”

What followed were days of chaos — would-be rescuers and spontaneous cleanup crews forming a chaotic throng on the beach, gradually organized by Leipzig and others — weeks of cleanup and years of legal wrangling.

When it was all over, some $27 million in lawsuit settlements had been paid out. Most of it went to cities and public agencies to compensate for loss of ocean recreation, but some was channeled into habitat restoration programs.

Now, birds and other wildlife are reaping the rewards.

More than $1 million was used in 2001 and 2002 to remove black rats from Anacapa Island, nesting place for the rare Xantus’s murrelet; afterward, populations of native birds, mice and lizards, suppressed for decades by the rats, began to flourish.

In 2006, about half a million in Trader settlement money was used to help build a science center in Upper Newport Bay.

And the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center, which rescues and rehabilitates hundreds of birds each year, got its start during the spill, when local rescue groups set up a makeshift center to care for the oiled birds.

An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 birds were killed in the oil spill, and only 600 rescued, rehabilitated and later released, said Debbie McGuire, wildlife director at the center.

Last week, McGuire and her center were dealing with a far smaller number of oiled birds from a far smaller oil spill in a flood channel.

For McGuire, who was working for a music and art school and serving as a veterinary volunteer in 1990, rushing to help rescue birds from the spill was a life-changing experience. It inspired her to turn her career toward wildlife rehabilitation.

“I’ll never forget that,” she said. “I remember going down there. I couldn’t believe how black our beaches were. The birds looked like blobs of black. You didn’t even know what it was.”

(Register file photo shows American Trader and crude oil oozing into the ocean.)

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