HOUSTON -- Hurricane Isaac's landfall southeast of New Orleans last month uncovered oil spilled in the 2010 Macondo well blowout incident, well operator BP PLC acknowledged late yesterday.

In a release, BP representatives said they were responding to an incident in which "limited amounts of residual Macondo oil" were re-exposed in an area where a prior cleanup was under way after Isaac passed over it.

The company said it has a cleanup plan ready to launch and is waiting for permission from regulators to move forward.

The company said the pollution appears to be tar that was previously covered up by sand and silt washed to shore by Tropical Storm Bonnie in 2010. Two years later, Isaac's storm surge and wave action appear to have pulled those sand deposits back out to sea, re-exposing the oil contamination, the company explained.

In a release, Mike Utsler, president of the Gulf Coast Restoration Organization at BP, said his firm had anticipated this sort of problem occurring as Isaac entered the Gulf of Mexico in late August.

"It was not unexpected to find Macondo oil in areas where we were working before the storm," said Utsler. "And that's where we've found it, buried in isolated stretches of shoreline we were cleaning before the storm hit."

BP said it had originally proposed to clean up washed-ashore oil at depths up to 4 to 5 feet but was blocked from doing so out of fears that operations to clean up deeply buried oil would cause more harm than good. Officials there now think the aftermath of Isaac will allow them to go in and clean up some of it in coastal central Louisiana.

Utsler's comments suggest the company is moving to expand the scope of initial cleanup operations in light of Isaac's impact.

"What we've seen post-Isaac has reaffirmed that the operational approach we've taken to clean amenity beaches has worked," he said. "BP now wants to apply this approach to some of these other areas where deeply buried tar mats have been exposed by Isaac."