You are walking on the beach, and what do you see? You step in messy globs of crude oil and tar. Ever since the oil spill in the Gulf; engineers and scientists have worked non-stop to create something to prevent more oil from escaping. In just one day over a million tons of oil swept into the Gulf. Oil spills are very disastrous to wildlife in the gulf, decaying bodies everywhere, limp and lifeless caused by an explosion April 20 on the Deepwater Horizon rig killing 11 workers and began what is now the largest oil spill in history. Fortunately, engineers have come up with a device, oil skimmers, which can consume all the excess oil.



Oil skimmers are the life savers of the Gulf including others that help clean up the oil in the Gulf. Oil skimmers are pieces of equipment that take out oil floating on the surface. Oil skimmers do their jobs by slurping up oil that lurks in the Gulf close to states like Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, and Florida. Early in July, the vessel "A Whale" arrived in the Gulf with the stated purpose of getting rid of oil separating it from water and. With a length of more than one thousand feet and a height of 175 feet, and can hold close to 2 million barrels of crude oil. Oil skimmers are so successful that they can assemble up to 71.2 to 139 million gallons of oil in a day. European countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and France have developed other kinds of skimmers for doing things more difficult in seas or oceans. Experience has shown that specially designed oil skimming vessels can collect and take aboard as much as 2000 barrels per day in a few
days.

Oil skimmers are everywhere doing the job that was to be done months earlier. Oil skimmers clean the water by soaking up 71.2 to 139 million gallons of oil. Oil spreads over the surface of seawater; the skimming process usually begins by lassoing giant puddles of oil with floating barriers called containment booms. Then, the skimmer attempts to drain off oil from the water for discarding or reuse. Oil skimmers also can use gravity to grab the oil by allowing oil to float to the top of the oil skimmer and then pushing the oil into a storage container. Furthermore, encrusted to the surface of belts, wheels, or rotating drums is a substance which attracts oil like moths to a light.

Working nonstop everyday, hundreds of people volunteered to clean up the oil a lot of aquatic life may have been killed but it is recovering day by day. The Gulf of Mexico cleanup crews work vigorously to block millions of gallons of oil from ending up in the snowy, white sand and clear, blue water. An oil skimming vessel which is called A Whale, about 10 stories high and as long as 3 1/2 football fields, can collect up to 21 million gallons of oil-fouled water a day. The ship works by taking in water through 12 vents, separating the oil and pumping the cleaned seawater back into the Gulf.