Īny response to oil spills includes considerations of oil containment, recovery, disposal and the logistics of delivering adequate response equipment quickly to the spill site. The resulting fire lasting approximately 45 min consumed all but 1100 L of residue that remained in the boom. It is a little known fact that using a fire resistant boom, approximately 57 000 L of oil from the Exxon Valdez that had been in the water for nearly two days was confined and burned. Industry was beginning to produce fire resistant booms that could be used to confine oil spilled on water in order to burn it in place. At the time of that spill, NIST and others were already engaged in the evaluation of burning as a response to oil spills. Some of the oil, driven by winds and currents, was deposited on the shoreline of Prince Williams Sound. An estimated 42 million liters of oil were released from the ship into the water. The 1989 oil spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker onto the waters of Prince Williams Sound in Alaska focused national attention on oil spills. One of the possible alternatives is to burn the oil in place-in situ burning. Industry needs to have alternative technologies to mechanical recovery for oil spill response. Mechanical recovery of oil in areas such as rocky shorelines, marshlands, and in ice-laden waterways is impractical.
Generally large amounts of oil contaminated materials need to be removed and treated. Historically oil spill response has been limited to various mechanical means of recovering the spilled oil from land or water and then disposing of or reprocessing the waste. Oil contamination of land or water is an environmental hazard to life. One of the risks of oil drilling and transportation is that accidents can occur releasing natural crude oil or its refined products in oil spills.
#Ross david fire burnin software#
ALOFT software is being used by oil spill response teams to help assess the potential impact of intentional burning. Predictions using the model were tested successfully against data from large-scale tests. New user-friendly software, ALOFT, was developed to quantify the large-scale features and trajectory of wind blown smoke plumes in the atmosphere and estimate the ground level smoke particulate concentrations. Data are given for pool fire burning rates, smoke yield, smoke particulate size distribution, smoke aging, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon content of the smoke for crude and fuel oil fires with effective diameters up to 17.2 m.
NIST measurements and predictions have played a major role in establishing in situ burning as a primary oil spill response method. Results of that research have been included in nationally recognized guidelines for approval of intentional burning. For more than a decade NIST conducted research to understand, measure and predict the important features of burning oil on water.
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