ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – Test or no test, Philip West with the city of Orange Beach still thinks there’s a tar mat in Perdido Pass. Maybe more than one.

The Army Corps of Engineer, the federal agency responsible for maintain Perdido Pass, received a warning from the Coast Guard and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management before the recent dredging work there began on May 4.

“The Coast Guard and ADEM said as much to the Corps and the contractor before the project even started,” West Coastal Resources Manager for the city, said. “They were like ‘if you get over there, be aware, we may have tar mat issues.’ They knew to be on the lookout.”

And West believes they found one on May 5. The test by the Coast Guard on a sample taken from Outcast Marina hours after the tar mat was believed hit didn’t prove much, West said.

“I don’t really put much stock in one sample in a marina six and a half hours after an incident, the release,” West said. “We can go to just about any marina we want, we can get a sample of oil on the water. There were too many other pieces of, call them evidence if you want, that were going on related to that release.”

West met Friday with Coast Guard Capt. Duke Walker who said his agency is developing a plan for dealing with the tar mat and it will be ready within 48 hours.

“He said ‘I asked them to get me something in 48 hours to look at and then I’ll punch holes in it,’” West said, who expects he’ll see that report by Wednesday.

After the meeting, West said he came away with a good impression of Walker.

“Primarily he wanted us to know he was taking this very seriously and was going to be aggressive about it,” West said. “We kind of ran down everything we knew so he could be brought up to speed on everything that we had.

“He’s very capable, down to earth, I think he’s sincere and he means it and he’s definitely going to hold their feet to the fire for us.”

As for it being a tar mat from BP’s oil spill, West says the evidence is strong.

“If there’s going to be a tar mat in that location chances are, odds are, greatly in favor that it was MC-252 oil, BP oil,” West said. “Part of the reason I say that is that channel has been maintained, but not since the oil spill. If there was a tar mat existing there before the oil spill, for whatever reason and that’s highly unlikely, it would have been dredged before because they were working within the federally maintained channel.”

The smell of oil from tar mats and tar balls, West said, is much different that from fuel, the likely source of the Outcast Marina sample.

“The smell from what the witnesses reported … when that petroleum hit the surface, they were describing it as, you know, sickening,” he said “And from breaking up big tar balls that were sealed up or a tar mat that’s been capped and sealed and sitting there for a long time, it does have a putrid, still petroleum, but more putrid smell than say refined petroleum, like diesel fuel or gasoline.

“It smells different and the old saying is the nose knows.”

West believes it all adds up to a tar mat under the sands of Perdido Pass and when found and tested, it will be BP oil.

“So all those tracks to still it’s a tar mat, they dredged into and it got released,” he said

And right now West and city crews are on the lookout for oil and tar balls from the incident to surface.

“I don’t know where the solids went,” he said. “We’re going to be looking, checking the beaches, at Bird Island, Robinson Island. We’ll probably take some samples where they pumped the sand in the water near the mouth of the pass.

“We just have anything in our hands like that right now.”