AFTI - The Permanent Boom Specialists

When an oil spill containment boom must be in the water all of the time, quality, durability, maintainability, and system design are more important than purchase price when determining life cycle cost. Let us put our experience, gained on more than 400 successful installations over the last 40 years, to work for you. OILFENCE™ and GlobeBoom® can be tailored, together with our wide array of installation hardware and accessories, into practical, cost effective systems which will survive the environment and work for years to come. For your response needs, the same high standards of quality are applied to our PyroBoom®, contractor boom, skimmers, dispersant delivery equipment and remote sensing systems. We also offer complete marine emergency response plans and boom and equipment repair and maintenance to organizations around the world. 

The oil spill industry has been perceived as one that changes only slowly. This might be because of the long interval between events, which precipitate major changes in equipment, techniques, and public policy. The Torrey Canyon in 1967, Amoco Cadiz in 1978, and Exxon Valdez in 1989 - each in March, 11 years apart and all classed as major incidents - were substantial watershed events that were largely responsible for creating heightened awareness and renewed interest in improving oil spill management.

The fact remains though that things do not stop between incidents. They just seem to take place at a different pace. The industry continues to press on with the knowledge that some new event will take place to stimulate change somewhere in the world. Each state, country, and region has had, or will have, some event that will maintain interest in protecting itself against oil spills.

Applied Fabric Technologies, Inc. (AFTI), in conjunction with other companies and individuals in the oil spill industry, has continued to work on developing processes and techniques to enhance oil spill response and recovery technology. Working on many fronts simultaneously, AFTI has developed several new processes and systems, which will make spill response more timely and effective. These technologies are in the areas of remote sensing, in-situ burning and fast water control, and recovery of oil. Both burning and fast water recovery techniques could be easily developed into a more effective joint recovery and disposal technology than that which presently exists.

Remote sensing is one area that can offer large returns for the users of the imagery when it is used to tactical advantage in a spill response. The Exxon Simplified Remote Sensing System (SRSS) presently marketed by the AFTI affiliate AR3, Inc. is a portable system designed for use in "Aircraft of Opportunity" which can enhance recovery and dispersant operations, and assist in damage assessment by differentiating between oils, black shorelines and cloud shadows, as well as providing a system that can track oil on the water surface at night and highlight thicker areas as response targets.

Remote sensing does not have to be very sophisticated and expensive, but it must be reliable. The SRSS brings off-the-shelf component reliability and user- friendly operations to the somewhat "black art" of aerial surveillance. Like many of the tools in the responder's kit, it might not be used every time, but when it does, a tool like the SRSS can repay the cost many times over the response efficiency and resource damage assessment.

Fast water booming has always been a difficult operation. The hydraulic phenomenon of entrainment does not make life easy for the oil spill responder. It has been shown long ago that oil wants to escape - entrain - from under a boom at current speeds of about 1 knot or more. Recent research conducted by AFTI on behalf of a major oil company at the OHMSETT facility has shown that by using simple technology to change the current flow, the onset of entrainment can be delayed significantly - to as high as 2.5 knots.

Testing continues on several configurations of the conventional GlobeBoom® using the enhancements with the goal of achieving a gross loss tow speed of approximately 3 knots. This improvement can dramatically increase the recovery rates of conventional boom sweep systems for activities such as sea skimming and in-situ burning.

AFTI has been involved in fire boom development work since 1985. The patented PyroBoom® design has been shown to perform among the best of conventional fire-proof booms in a variety of independent test over the last 3 years. PyroBoom® is simply a combination of specifically selected material consolidated into a patented design. Other products, which are modifications of conventional boom designs and protected by materials which are not designed for use in the marine environment, were not able to contain burning oil under wave and current loads.

One of the advantages of PyroBoom®, and the stainless steel PocketBoom, is the ability to be used in the water without deleterious effects. All booms that require water-cooling, whether active or passive, become waterlogged masses weighing vastly more wet than dry. The drying time may be several days to weeks. Even them, the biological mass accumulated in the boom fabric may well make it unpleasant or unsanitary to handle. Once burned, almost 50% of the original value of the PyroBoom® can still be recovered and re-used, in the field and without any special tools.

Perhaps the strongest attribute of the PyroBoom® is its ability to be used just like a conventional boom. No special handling, launching, or support equipment is required to put it into service. In the heat of a recovery project, the last thing an operator needs is failure of some support equipment or component that could lead to immediate shutdown or catastrophic failure of the system.

Fail-safe is another word associated with PyroBoom®. Eventually, some of the above surface barrier is going to degrade from heat exposure. This is a slow process and does not occur in a catastrophic manner such as with air-inflated booms, whether active or passively cooled.

One joint development project in the planning stage is to combine the fast water capability learned on GlobeBoom® and combine it with PyroBoom® with the possibility of being able to sweep oil at 3 knots and conduct in-situ burning at the same time. With 95% disposal effectiveness already demonstrated by burning when the appropriate conditions exist, the incentive is to be able to burn at sea instead of conducting an expensive dispersant application or mechanical recovery. Of course, there are many scenarios confronting the responder, and in-situ burning is only one. However, if the equipment is available, many more response options become available.

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