Where the Booms Come From

At the Venice marina in Louisiana, there are a cast of characters usually milling about the fish gutting table watching the latest yellowfin catch come in and be sliced up and others are perched up on the second story of the CrawGators bar and grill enjoying a bucket of Bud Light. At the outdoor patio, I ran into a group that stand to make a killing from the BP oil spill--they run a company that supplies booms for oil spills.

They told me there are currently about 800,000 feet of boom in the Gulf right now in various areas of the spill and that the size of that order could cost upwards of $1.2 million to lease, and they currently supply about 5% of the order. The men explained to me that in situations like oil spills (and what BP is currently doing) is lease booms to clean up a spill. A number of companies produce or supply boom for spills around the world and some of the booms being used in the Gulf may have even travelled from a recent spill in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where there’s a brine shrimp industry periodically needing protection from toxic spills.

The men were currently waiting to hear from a colleague who had recently flown to Asia to close a major deal with a Chinese boom producer and were planning to bid as the supplier to BP to provide the largest amount of boom for the current Gulf operations. They were already calling in all of their contacts from around the world to get extra boom to New Orleans. Boom was coming from Portland, Ore., New Jersey, and they’d called people in Turkey and Norway. They were also calling in contacts who could supply the connectors needed to maintain the booms while at sea.

As they explained to me, plastic booms have a shelf life of 3-4 years, but most companies will rent them for a one time use and then those same booms will be cleaned off, go through the decontamination process, be patched up if need be, and sent to the next disaster. The media has covered reports of booms getting torn or twisted up in the rough Gulf weather and I was told that boom companies are already working to bring in sections from the Gulf that need to be repaired or cleaned off and sent back out. If the booms can’t be repaired, most are recycled or possibly reused as new boom to be kept waiting for the next oil spill.

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