Uh oh..."Boom used in Gulf oil spill works in limited way" experts say:
Good oil containment boom material has become scarce and more expensive, and it is debatable whether it can save the day in the Gulf of Mexico by corralling the oil spill before it reaches shore.
More than 500,000 feet of oil containment booms, the orange inflatable floating lines designed to contain oil on the water's surface, has been strung throughout the Gulf in response to the spill that threatens the coastline.
In harbors and other sheltered waters, the lightweight vinyl-coated polyester or nylon boom works just fine. In choppy saltwater, the rate of effectiveness is 10 percent at best, experts say.
David Grunfeld / The Times-PicayuneOil booms are torn apart from the high surf at the mouth of South Pass, south of Venice. "In open turbulent water, you can't catch the oil," said Robert Bea, a former oil tanker captain turned professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. "There is intense wave action out there most of the time. To expect that you can trap oil on the surface in open water conditions, I'd say, 'Prove it.' "
Bea said that the images of orange or yellow boom linked together by fishers and shrimpers who are employed for the cleanup have value in the face of disaster.
"Window dressing is not necessarily bad. With that window dressing comes hope, and maybe we will learn something new," said Bea, a 48-year veteran in the design of offshore platforms and other marine systems. "Don't get your expectations too high."
The oil giant said Wednesday of its supplies, "BP has a supply of boom and other resources on hand to cover the next seven to ten days of planned response activity, and has put in place a supply chain that should enable it to deliver additional supplies as needs arise."
The disaster has created a sore demand for boom.
"We're flat out; we're backlogged," said Lenny Johnson, president of Chemtex in Cumberland, R.I., a distributor of oil spill cleanup supplies since 1998. "Every manufacturer in the country is backlogged a month. My phone rings every five minutes."
John McCusker / The Times-PicayuneA boat lays out oil containment booms east of Southwest Pass in lower Plaquemines Parish on Wednesday. Johnson just got home from spending a week along the Gulf Coast, including Venice and Mobile, and has shipped 20 tractor-trailer loads of various oil spill cleanup products to the region, including 30,000 feet of containment boom.
"I'm not as big as some of these other guys in New Orleans," Johnson said Wednesday from his office. "If this spill is as big as it could be, we haven't been able to make enough to supply. Picture booming from Louisiana to Pensacola, Fla. It's impossible."
John McCusker / The Times-PicayuneBilly Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, and Gov. Bobby Jindal meet on a jack-up boat Wednesday. Since the April 20 explosion on the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, about 210,000 gallons of oil per day has been gushing into the Gulf. Boom material comes in various grades, sold by the foot or in 100-foot sections, measuring about 6 inches in diameter with a 12-inch skirt designed to trap the oil, which is lighter than water only if it hasn't mixed with sediment, debris or even chemicals meant for cleanup.
A 100-foot section costs about 20 dollars to buy, or $2 a day to rent, which is what agencies are doing in the Gulf lately.
"Everybody who makes it is starting to ramp up 24/7 to make as much containment boom as possible," said Mitchell Mark of Snee Chemical in Harahan, a distributor of boom and other oil cleanup products. "I would hope that the feds and the Coast Guard have released everything they had to us."
Scientists like Ed Overton of Louisiana State University point out that the Gulf oil spill is unprecedented, as deep-sea oil drilling is still cutting-edge.
"We haven't had this much oil spill in this close proximity to coastal marshes," said Overton, a chemist by trade. "Containment booms are certainly an option. How effective they are depends on the weather condition, the hand that Mother Nature's going to deal. It's damn near the only option you've got."
There is a debate among oil system experts over whether clean-up efforts, such as using absorbent booms designed to soak up oil, do more damage than intended.
"Those are like tubes; they're full of oil-absorbing material," said Nathan Ryan, an inside sales representative at Becker and Associates in Lombard, Ill. "Those are really no good out in the open water. They float and oil migrates underneath
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