BP America Answers Your Questions: Innovative, Efficient Cleaning Techniques
by BP America on Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 8:07am
A machine called a "Powerscreen" helps clean the beaches in Orange Beach, AL. With a series of different size screens, it filters large objects to one side, small items to the other and clean sand out through the front.
Question: Our first question is from @Ryan Coe, who asks, "Regarding the Gulf restoration, are there any innovative machines/vehicles coming that could show to be labor saving? This is in reference to the shoreline restoration primarily."
Answer: Thanks for your question, Ryan. More than 123,000 suggestions have been submitted to BP from internal and external parties. Individuals providing suggestions ranged from 9- to 90-year-olds from all around the world, and provided ideas in support of our response efforts. From these, about 80,000 were focused on the subsea well and stopping the flow, and more than 40,000 were focused on our surface response from offshore to onshore.
A team of more than 80 scientists, engineers, and other specialists evaluated and continue to evaluate these ideas to identify those that could help immediately and those that could be long term ideas for the future. Examples of some of these ideas that we have tested and implemented include tar ball recovery techniques, tar mat recovery techniques both near-shore and on the beaches. We have developed machinery including the Sand Sharks, Land Sharks and significant modifications of machinery used in the road building industries as well as existing beach cleaning machinery to support our efforts on removing oil that impacted our shorelines. We continue to look for both new and continuing enhancements to ensure our success at cleaning both the beaches and impacted marshes.
To date, there are more than 61 differing types of mechanical machines being used along with 6,000 people working every day in this effort.
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