Digital Extra

Roused in the middle of the night, they were a battalion of warriors setting out to save a land they knew little of.

They are the cleanup crew of Clean Ventures, an environmental company based in Elizabeth, N.J. They drove through the night, and hit the beaches at dawn. As a team, they battled time while the reddish-brown oil slick spread.

Dressed in yellow slickers and lugging oil-absorbant material, they fanned the shore. It was all in a day's work, in a day that might be the first of many.

And while few of these men knew anything of the delicate spartina-laced salt pond they were working to protect, they are a critical element in a range of containment efforts.

There were others. Hundreds of them.

John E. Aucott, a program manager for the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency, said the crisis response mobilized about 500 people, from senators and a federal cabinet member to helicopter pilots, biologists and truck drivers.

And it was his job to coordinate it all.

As head logistician, Aucott was charged with setting up extra phone lines, computers, fax machines, maps, bulletin boards, a copy machine and helicopter flights for officials as well as organizing food for the mini-village that sprung up around the operation's nerve center at the Dutch Inn in Galilee.

Aucott battled potential pandemonium.

In all, there were more than a dozen local, state and federal agancies involved, including police, the Department of Environmental Management, the U.S. Coast Guard and 250 workers employed by five private salvage and environmental cleanup contractors.

William Taylor, the education director for the local Audubon Society, came by to help establish a system for transporting injured birds, toting Kathryn, his four-month-old baby.

And the Red Cross was there, handing out coffee and food.

Typical of disasters, those in the field operated without much of the same information that those at the command post had, where there prevailed into the afternoon a sense that a disaster had narrowly been averted.

"We have reason to be guardedly optimistic," said Arnold Witte, the president of Don Jon Marine, the salvage company heading the cleanup and salvage effort.

The plan then was to surround the North Cape and block the salt ponds and estuaries with protective booming, then lighten the barge by pumping oil from it into a second barge, freeing the North Cape from the sand.

Aboard a 44-foot Coast Guard craft, Coast Guard Boatswain Mark Corbishley helped transport personnel between a Galilee boathouse and two Coast Guard cutters anchored offshore.

Cutting through a rainbow-colored oil slick that stretched three and a half miles from the sand-lodged North Cape to the Harbor of Refuge wall, there was still some question as to whether the booms would be up before nightfall.

On shore, a Clean Ventures worker manned a front-end loader and hurried to plug a sluiceway between the salt pond and the now-tainted ocean.

"Blocking Trustom is a trade-off," said Terry Gray, DEM's chief of site remediation. "Sometimes this kind of major alteration can do more harm than good."