How do you clean up an oil spill on water? You use a two-step process, both of which involve oil spill booms. Read on to discover how it works.
When you're in charge of cleaning up an oil spill on water, be it big or small, there are always two steps you have to take. You can't just dump an absorbent in the middle of the spill and hope that this will take care of the situation.
The problem is that while the absorbent, whether it's an oil boom or another form of absorbent, will start absorbing some of that oil, the rest of it will spread and spread. And that's exactly what needs to be avoided.
And so, in order to minimize the spreading of the oil, we need to take another step first, before we even think about clean-up: We need to contain the spill.
And for this purpose, absorbent oil booms are ideal. They're 10 or 20 feet long, and you can string as many of them together as you need in order to encircle the spill. And only then, once the spill is safely contained, you go about the task of cleaning the spill up.
After all, once the spill is surrounded by oil booms, it cannot go anywhere and you can drop a series of oil booms into the water and let them absorb the oil. Once they're saturated, you pull them back out and drop in fresh booms. Then simply repeat this sequence until all the oil is absorbed.
It's interesting that you can get this dual use out of your oil booms. While they all absorb oil, the primary purpose of the ones that surround the spill is to keep the spill in one place and prevent it from spreading into the open water.
Yet at the same time, oil absorbent booms can also absorb oil -- and they're highly effective at cleaning up the spill.
And here's the thing -- they work just find on land as well. Of course, you do have more options on land -- you can use spill berms for containment, and you can use all sorts of other absorbents to clean the spill up, but booms are the absorbents with the highest capacity so if the spill is big, they may just be the ticket.
Imagine the capacity of one single boom. How many pads, socks, or pillows would you need to absorb an equivalent amount of oil? Of course it's always a good idea to have a range of different options handy, especially on land. When it comes to big spills on water, though, you need to think big, and oil booms are just the ticket.
Want to know more about oil booms? Get valuable tips and the latest news about absorbents and other environmental safety products on Travis Zdrazil's Safety Maintenance News blog and get his free newsletter too. Travis is an expert on environmental safety products and has supplied businesses with products to aid in meeting EPA and OSHA requirements for more than 10 years. You may publish this article, but must keep the resource box ©2009 PCI Products Company. All rights reserved. |
