Alaskan oil spill inspires inventors

Press, 1 May 1989, Page 8

Alaskan oil spill inspires inventors

NZPA-Reuter Seward, Alaska

Last month’s Alaskan oil spill has become a gold rush for inventors who are flooding Exxon with advice for a price on cleaning up the mess.

Exxon said recently it would spend whatever it took to clean up the disaster which was caused when its Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground on March 24, spilling 10 million gallons of crude oil into pristine Arctic waters.

The announcement has inspired masses of inventors.

Each day Exxon and the Coast Guard receive plans, chemical formulas for dispersants and blueprints for giant extractors to clear Alaska’s waters and coastlines of the residue of crude oil left by the spill.

Al Maki, Exxon’s chief scientist on the scene, displays a fat,

overflowing folder of unsolicited suggestions. At the nearby Coast Guard clean-up headquarters, Captain Glen Haines says, “We are going to send these suggestions and what have you back to our research station in Groton, Connecticut, where they can be looked at, but at this rate, we might have to use a C--5A cargo plane to get them there.”

Meanwhile, Jack Bailey, aged 40, sits perched on his 10-speed bike on a wind-swept hill, surveying the nearby beach where a work crew uses big paper towels to wipe oil from rocks. “What a waste of time,” he said to bystanders, shaking his head in disgust. Mr Bailey, who pans for gold and fishes for salmon for a living, drove down from his base near Palmer, north of Anchorage, to show Exxon his idea of clean-

ing up the muck.

It is a kind of watercirculating vacuum cleaner that uses a pair of pumps, wide-mouthed hoses, old window screens and a wooden box. Mr Bailey said he wants to sell the prototype to Exxon so the company can build a large-scale version. Mr Bailey said the idea came to him while he stood waist-deep in a fast-moving river in northern Alaska, sluicing for gold. He thought the process of running water, pebbles and sand through a screen to extract bits of gold could be adapted to catch the gobs of thick oil now soiling the beaches. Mrßailey’s device has not yet been ruled out. Exxon said it is forwarding all technical suggestions to its research centre in New Jersey, where engineers and scientists have more time to view them than do the 300 or so cleaning up in Alaska.