A cleanup company from central Oregon was scheduled to go to the Gulf of Mexico when it learned of last weekend's Red Butte Creek oil spill.

"We just switched directions" and came to Salt Lake City, said Oliver Weger, a supervisor among a dozen contract workers dealing Monday afternoon with one finger of the 33,000-gallon leak.

A small portion infiltrated a pond that services the sprinkling system at Mount Olivet Cemetery, across 500 South from the University of Utah's Rice-Eccles Stadium. That leaves longtime cemetery caretaker Danny Valdez a little nervous about how he will keep his grounds green if that pond cannot be used heading into Utah's typically dry summer.

"We didn't get that much oil. But any amount isn't good," Valdez said. "We have to start watering soon and that's our irrigation."

On Tuesday afternoon, the cemetery was as green as it's ever going to be for this time of year, well fed by May's repeated showers. A deer lazily walking through the grounds slowed traffic to Florence Odenwalder's funeral, but seemed to take no notice of men in bright yellow jackets working nearby among headstones with 19th-century birth dates.

The workers were cleaning out a shallow ditch, pulling out clumps of vegetation with oily surfaces and preparing to remove the ditch's soiled, chipped concrete lining.

"We just basically clean a section at a time," said Weger, noting most of his crew's attention had been focused on the pond just uphill.

Tucked into a notch between 500 South and the tennis facility on Guardsman Way, the 25-foot-deep pond now sports a white boom to absorb surface oil before it reaches a thicket of cattails along the east shore.

There isn't much of an oily sheen on the water, a blessing Valdez attributed to the wet spring filling the pond to near capacity before the spill.

So when the oil started running down

Red Butte Creek, only a small portion of the flow forced its way into the pond. Most of the sullied water went down an overflow ditch. Crews scoured that channel Monday, filling several heavy-duty black plastic bags with tainted materials.

"This really isn't as bad as a gas or diesel spill," said Weger, whose résumé includes cleanups of meth labs, truck wrecks and suicides.

"With gas or diesel, it's more refined and goes into the ground a whole lot deeper. This crude won't dive real deep," he added. "It's a surface clean. That's good. You don't want it to get into the groundwater."

Valdez was satisfied with the crew's get-to-it approach. "These guys are meticulous," he said. "Everything seems to be going well."

Still, he gets itchy not knowing when he will be able to water the grounds around the graves of early mining and railroad magnates (including former Utah Gov. Simon Bamberger) and Greek immigrants.

"We have to get with somebody soon and come up with a [watering] plan," Valdez said. "After they clean the reservoir, we'll have to fill it."