...makes the cells between the blades of the impeller shrink or expand during rotation, depending on proximity to the outside wall and the depth of their imersion into the liquid seal. This alignment creates suction on one side as cells expand and compression on the other as they shrink. The low-friction pumps can achieve 27 in. of vacuum with their 1,500 rpm rotation, says O’Rourke. They can be used to draw up extremely dense materials, including heavy sludge and gravel.

Adapting the portable, high-volume pumps from their traditional, oil-refinery role, says Isakson, DRC retrieved 18,762 gal of oil from Louisiana waters in a single day, which is more than 200 skimmers collected on their best day, in July, according to the Louisiana governor’s office.

Pump It Up

In May, 50 Triton pumps were working the spill, with 300 more on order. Triton’s Lottie, La., manufacturing plant ramped up production to increase annual output from 20 machines to more than 100.

Another contractor, Strad Energy Services, Denver, subbing under DRC, worked 14 barges and 24 Triton vacuum units on Louisiana waters. “One time, when the governor was here, we picked up over 4,000 gal of heavy, heavy crude in 45 minutes,” says Ken Marbach, the company’s southern regional manager of business development. “That’s where Triton has the advantage. … The crude is really, really thick. Most of the other vacuums, they end up burning up the pumps.”

Triton’s relatively small size and portability makes the unit a good choice for barges or other shallow-draft vessels needed for getting to oil in inlets and marshes, Marbach says.

The vacuum units were developed in 1997 by Mike James, Triton’s president, to address a need at refineries and petrochemical plants to find smaller, less expensive equipment for heavy cleanup, like removing crude sludge from the bottom of tanks. “The industry uses vacuum trucks that are very large to do fairly small jobs sometimes,” James explains.

The Triton’s footprint is about one-tenth the size of the 80,000-lb, 18-wheelers the industry usually uses for tank cleaning. Triton’s pumps also develop a greater vacuum, compared to the 15 in. typically produced by vacuum trucks. “A perfect vacuum in science is 29.94 in.,” O’Rourke says.

The largest Triton unit weighs 10,000 lb and is 8-ft square with a 6-in. hose. The smallest weighs about 4,000 lb and has a 3-in. hose. “It can pick up anything that can fit in that hose,” James says.

Decisions about equipment and methods should be refined before the next oil-spill disaster, advises Bob Buckley, retired offsite tank coordinator and spill response coordinator for the ExxonMobil Refinery in Baton Rouge, La. In the midst of a crisis, “right technologies are not necessarily applied in the right scenarios,” he says. “A lot of equipment being used now is the same that was used in 1989, the year of the Exxon Valdez spill.”

Back Seat for R&D

While oil interests spend money on spill prevention, Buckley adds, they tend to ignore research and development for cleaning technology. “The result is a lot of inefficiency, a lot of waste, politics and people being paid to shut up. For the money spent, it isn’t picking up a lot of oil,” Buckley says.

Response planning also lags behind needs. As a result of the Valdez spill, Exxon has “a ton of spill equipment located at each site,” and its own disaster alert plan, Buckley says, but without government indemnifications for sister companies stepping in to assist, a company not directly involved in a disaster is not likely to provide support during a crisis.

Still, the tough economy and the deepwater drilling moratorium may create opportunities for innovation as companies seek to lower the cost of operations or develop new products, James says. For example, another invention may soon find a niche in oil-spill cleanups: Triton Seafoam is a polymeric solidifier that consolidates oil into a blanket-like mass, making it easier to retrieve from coastlines and marshes. “It is in the final stages of EPA approval,” James says.