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What's the worst thing you can imagine happening to something you love? For the crew of R/V Magnet, who love the ocean for more reasons than we can count, one of the worst things we can imagine is dumping 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the San Francisco Bay and letting it spread out. We don't need to sit around imagining it, because on Wednesday morning the container vessel Cosco Busan made a major navigational blunder, ran into a piling (W-4) of the Bay Bridge, and emptied the contents of two of it's fuel tanks into the Bay.
The TarBallTrap is the second in a series of low cost oil spill cleanup devices we're working on. While authorities have discouraged Bay Area citizens from cleaning up oil on their own, Magnet discourages authorities from interfering with Bay Area citizens engaged in the stewardship of their watershed. Done safely, using the TarBallTrap is no more dangerous than putting gas in your lawn mower. Honestly, it's probably safer.
If you'd like to cleanup tar balls in an oil spill, but need a simpler device, check out our SlickSack, also on instructables. That thing takes less than ten minutes and you're up and running.
The TarBallTrap is the second in a series of low cost oil spill cleanup devices we're working on. While authorities have discouraged Bay Area citizens from cleaning up oil on their own, Magnet discourages authorities from interfering with Bay Area citizens engaged in the stewardship of their watershed. Done safely, using the TarBallTrap is no more dangerous than putting gas in your lawn mower. Honestly, it's probably safer.
If you'd like to cleanup tar balls in an oil spill, but need a simpler device, check out our SlickSack, also on instructables. That thing takes less than ten minutes and you're up and running.
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Signing UpStep 1A peak at the whiteboard session.
On Magnet, we do our whiteboarding on the overhead - which is what you call the ceiling on a boat if you're trying to confuse people who don't spend a lot of time on boats. We included a picture of the whiteboard, as that's as close to plans as we come for a project like this.
The TarBallTrap is designed to meet the needs of normal people, outraged at the site of sticky glops of bunker fuel floating around in their watershed. Our goal was to develop something that could be either built at low cost in low volume, or engineered for high volume manufacture for distribution in coastal areas. We like the idea that it can be carried around on the dock to clean up different slips. We think it won't be hard to carry on beaches either. We'll try that soon.
We think of TarBallTrap1 as a two stage buoyancy filter - which is to say, it traps things that float. If it doesn't get them the first time, it tries again. The sketch of TBT1 is a section view of a 5 gallon bucket with a 2 quart bucket inside.
The TarBallTrap is designed to meet the needs of normal people, outraged at the site of sticky glops of bunker fuel floating around in their watershed. Our goal was to develop something that could be either built at low cost in low volume, or engineered for high volume manufacture for distribution in coastal areas. We like the idea that it can be carried around on the dock to clean up different slips. We think it won't be hard to carry on beaches either. We'll try that soon.
We think of TarBallTrap1 as a two stage buoyancy filter - which is to say, it traps things that float. If it doesn't get them the first time, it tries again. The sketch of TBT1 is a section view of a 5 gallon bucket with a 2 quart bucket inside.
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