Leading New York-based boom and oil spill equipment manufacturer Applied Fabric Technologies, for instance, reports that the materials needed by the company to make new products is limited, since boom makers do not carry large inventories, and weeks of lead time are needed to order fabric and step up production.
While BP is attempting to stop the leak from its source on the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico, a 1,200-square-mile oil spill is expanding towards a large stretch of Louisiana’s sensitive coastal shores where local authorities and fleets of private boats are prepared to assist with the deployment of boom lines to curtain off or scoop up the slick.
The problem is complicated by Louisiana’s ragged coast. Measured straight across, the state has 397 miles of coastline. But it has 7,700 miles of tidal shore line, a fundamentally different landscape than other Gulf Coast states that tend to have more unified beach-like shores. The boom strategy for some areas will call for layers of lines, adding more demand for the products.
BP has reported that it has already deployed one million feet of boom materials in dealing with the slick, and has another half a million feet on order.
Some types of boom are more available than others. Absorbent booms based on nonwovens, which sponge up the oil, are more fragile in open water, but can be produced cheaply and quickly in massive amounts quickly. So-called ‘hard booms’, which can contain or redirect surface oil, are more expensive and are the least available.
It is believed that a number of US States have public and private stores of boom for their own contingencies and are not letting go of them.
In a grass-roots measure to help deal with the crisis, however, the Matter of Trust charity has been co-ordinating a nationwide project to collect hair, fur and tights which can be made into crude boom materials.
“There are 370,000 hair salons sending hair, in addition to 100,000 pet groomers, alpaca and sheep farmers, and the other day we had a huge group of transvestites, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who donated their very long nylons,” Lisa Gautier, co-founder of the charity told AFP.
Matter of Trust has subsequently been receiving 204,000 kg of hair and fur on a daily basis and the US Army Corps of Engineers has worked out a way to make a mile of boom a day with the hair and fur, which will be laid on beaches to soak up any oil that washes ashore.
Hair and fur will typically soak up around four to six times their weight in oil, while industrial booms based on nonwovens mop up 15 times their weight. Meanwhile, a new UK company called CI Agent Solutions is providing a revolutionary product which turns the oil spill into solid rubber-like mass.
Already, a nonwoven-based barrier several miles long has been built on Dauphin Island, three miles south of the mouth of Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico and potentially the scene of some of the worst pollution .
This is now officially the world’s largest oil and water separator.
As the oil enters the barrier, it is turned into solids which can then be taken away for non-hazardous disposal or recycling into other products such as asphalt. CI Agent polymer is also being used by utility companies for pollution protection around transformers, waste pipes and hundreds of other applications.
