Oil spills in ocean, on surfers at Folly Beach

FOLLY BEACH, S.C. (WCBD) – Officials say around 8:35 a.m. Wednesday morning, the oil spill was reported near the Folly Beach Pier. News 2 spoke with a beachgoer who says she, along with many others, were covered in oil.

Cat Sidwell was on her surfboard when suddenly something fell from above.

“Started to smell like oil and it was like real slick all over our skin and board and stuff,” Sidwell said. “And it kind of hit me first. I was like the closer one to the pier.”

Soon, other surfers in the area felt the oil rain from above as well.

“Everybody was kind of yelling like, ‘Oh my god, we’re all covered in oil,’” Sidwell said. “It smelled, it was super strong.”

Sidwell says they confronted the construction company on the pier about the spill, but says they were dismissive.

“We kind of yelled up to the guys that were working on the pier like, ‘Hey, you’re spilling oil,’” she said. “And they just yelled back something silly, like laughing that it was biodegradable.”

U.S. Coast Guard officials say the spill was from a faulty hydraulic hammer used on site.

“They had spilled three to four gallons of organic hydraulic oil,” U.S. Coast Guard public affairs representative Vincent Moreno said.

Charleston Waterkeeper executive director Andrew Wunderley says the fact that it’s organice is besides the point.

“Biodegradable or not,” Wunderley said, “it’s still hydraulic fluid and it has no place in the ocean. It doesn’t belong in our waterways, it doesn’t belong on the beach and it certainly doesn’t belong on people.”

Wunderley believes the company should have done more to notify beachgoers of the spill.

“We’d like to see,” he said, “in this case, the responsible party take it a lot more seriously. It sounds like from what we’ve heard that they did a good job of getting it stopped, but they needed to go the next step and warn the public and say, ‘Hey, this just happened you need to stay out of the water. You need to use caution.”

And thinks they should be held accountable.

“The enforcement agencies in this case are the U.S. Coast Guard and DHEC,” Wunderley said, “and what we are calling on them to do is to investigate, and if there is anything out of the ordinary, they need to fine at a significant level in order to prevent this from happening again.”

The U.S. Coast Guard says the spill is contained and the incident is still under investigation.