i learned a new word this week: boom

Oil spills can cause big problems for our ecosystem. We all remember in 1989 the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William sound, Alaska. It took over a decade for the wildlife to rebound and two decades before things turned back to normal.In New Jersey is a company called Marine Spill Response Corp., which has a fleet of 15 vessels to clean up oil spills on any of the East Coast ports or inlets. These ships have skimmer intake hoses and reels to pick up the oil that floats on top of the water from the spill. They can respond to large or small oil spills with their fleet and even their smaller vessels have four 1000-gallon storage tanks for the recovered oil.

Each unit has oil water separators and oil heaters to help treat the recovered oil. When one of these ships arrives on the scene it lowers out a giant boom and begins to pump the oil through the boom. If you’ll recall there was a huge oil spill in Philadelphia on the water in 2004 and there have been several other smaller spills, both from ships and leaky tanks due to inclement weather and man-made mistakes that the Marine Spill Response Corp. has cleaned up.  

This is just one way that entrepreneurs and industry are teaming up to help mitigate potential ecosystem disasters in our environment. By preventing such oil spills from polluting the local water, we can save local wildlife from devastation. Please consider all this in 2006.



“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is an online writer in retirement.