Shore, coastline hit with tar balls

Oil patties appear after Alberto’s rain bands soak area.

DELRAY BEACH — Littered along Delray Beach’s coastline this weekend were globs of oil that washed ashore sometime after Subtropical Storm Alberto’s rain bands drenched the state’s east coast.

It isn’t clear how the oil ended up along the beach. It’s even a mystery to the U.S. Coast Guard, overseeing the cleanup and looking into the oil spill.

“When it comes to the storms, sometimes they do churn up stuff like this,” said Petty Officer Johnathan Lally, spokesman for the Coast Guard’s Miami division. “We don’t know if it’s correlated or not though.”

There weren’t any reported oil spills or other pollution incidents over the weekend that could explain the phenomenon.

An outside contractor was collecting the oil patties or tar balls, an emulsion of crude oil and water, as of Tuesday morning, Lally said. It isn’t clear how much washed ashore, or whether they were spotted along other beaches.

Delray Beach was the only reported sighting as of Tuesday, Lally said.

The cleanup takes time, as the Coast Guard wants to be “thorough,” he added. Oil patties can remain deep in the sands of otherwise pristine beaches, where they’re harder to clean and slower to break down.

Delray Beach resident Steven Corey Barkoff was walking his dogs Sunday afternoon, during a rain lull amid Alberto’s wave of heavy downpour. Barkoff stepped in an oil patty, and it immediately slid off his foot.

It felt like “soft play dough,” Barkoff said. He soon after noticed the oil patties could be seen for 100 yards along Delray’s shoreline.

“When I stepped in it, I first thought, ‘What is that?’” he said. His two 13-year-old dogs, Coco and Goldie, also stepped in the oil, but it clung to their paws.

“It was pretty difficult to get off,” Barkoff said. He used dish detergent to scrub the oil from his pets’ paws. He spoke with U.S. Coast Guard officials Monday, who also told him it’s unclear the source of the oil.

Barkoff made a video of the strange sighting and shared it on Facebook.

He tries picking up the patties in the video, eventually dropping one and saying, “it’s like a glob of ... black muck.”