Firsthand look at the world’s biggest oil skimmer and it looks massively huge. The skimmer aptly called the ‘whale’ is out in the Gulf with a purpose: to clean up the oil spill spanning over hundreds of miles. The retrofitted cargo vessel is 10 stories tall, the width of a football field and as long as almost four football fields. The gigantic vessel can gather up to 400,000 barrels of oil a day until now painfully accomplished by some 500 skimming boats in two months. The ‘whale’ is equipped with large slits called jaws, which pull oily water into ship’s hull for filtering oil and dispersing water. While this gargantuan vessel awaits approval to commence cleanup operations one can’t help wondering on the delay in bringing the skimmer on the scene much earlier.
Via: TreeHugger