Gulf Shores, AL. — Orange Beach, AL. — A smattering of tarballs began showing up in certain spots in both Gulf Shores and Orange Beach on Tuesday in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Lee.

“We’re getting into those where, after having weather, it’s bound to increase,” Phillip West, Coastal Resources Director for Orange Beach said. “About three days is the typical (time) for the material to show up in much, much greater quantities.

“A lot of people just thought it’s going to jump up there right near the storm, but that’s generally not the case. Rip currents pull that material out.”

West said two areas of beach in his city have seen tarballs washing up: The extreme western edge and an area just east of the Gulf State Park Cotton Bayou access.

“We’re going out there tonight with a UV light to look at it,” he said Wednesday afternoon. “We ran it last night from Romar Beach access to the pass and it worked really good. Just in the same spots we had visibly seen the tar, from about Turquoise Place to the Island House, it showed up there again.

Tonight we’re going to run it again.”

West said the areas where the tarballs came in matched areas offshore identified as having tarmats in the Gulf.

In Gulf Shores there were also two areas of concern.

“Most of the tarballs were around Little Lagoon Pass, on the western side of Little Lagoon Pass,” Grant Brown, Director of Recreation and Cultural Affairs for Gulf Shores said. “We had some fairly decent-sized ones, maybe a tennis ball, about that size in diameter. And we also went down the rest of the beach out toward Fort Morgan and quite a lot of tarballs down on the Fort Morgan peninsula west of South Mobile Street, west of the Bon Secour Wildlife property.”

BP has had crews working in both cities cleaning beaches.

“BP’s out really working hard to get some tarballs up,” Brandan Franklin, Gulf Shores Building and Environmental Official, said. “There’s just some different spots in Gulf Shores that actually had impact, not throughout the entire beach. In different locations there were several that washed ashore.”

BP was notified on Tuesday, but didn’t make out to clean until Wednesday morning.

“Would we have liked to seen them out there yesterday? Yes,” Franklin said. “But having them out there early this morning taking care of it is pretty good.”

West spent part of his day getting BP beach access across private property to areas the company wants to clean.

“It’s bank-owned and they’ve had some trouble with the bank returning phone calls,” West said. “We’re trying to grease those skids for them. We don’t want them to have any excuse not to be out there working.”

As far as other damage from the storm, officials from both Gulf Shores and Orange Beach reported little damage.

“A couple of power lines down, put back up, a little bit of high water around the lagoon,” Brown said. “The lagoon got so full of water on the south side that we had some flooding around the roadways, but no damage to report. We’re lucky.”

“Mostly we just had flooding,” West said. “Had a few trees down, a few down on the trail, but generally nothing really significant.”

Brown said public works crews in Gulf Shores were getting other debris from the storm off the beach and making sure bike trails were clear of limbs.