Is there any household product that can stop or slow the spread of an oil spill?
A. Although we don’t use household products to control oil spills, much of the technology that we use is based on common household ideas. Booms, for example, are used to stop oil from spreading and to keep it contained. There are lots of different types of booms, but these are the three main types: • Hard Boom – Hard boom is like a floating piece of plastic that has a cylindrical float at the top and is weighted at the bottom so that it has a “skirt” under the water. If the currents or winds are not too strong, booms can also be used to make the oil go in a different direction (this is called “deflection booming”). • Sorbent Boom – Sorbent boom looks like a long sausage made out of a material that absorbs oil. If you were to take the inside of a disposable diaper out and roll it into strips, it would act much like a sorbent boom. Sorbent booms don’t have the “skirt” that hard booms have, so they can’t contain oil for very long. • Fire Boom – The third type of boom, fire boom, is not us
