What are Oil Spills?

Oil spills are very common and happen quite frequently. When oil spills occur, the oil spills into rivers and oceans. Most of the time, they are caused by accidents that happened while dealing with pipelines, tankers, storage facilities, and more. Since they happen pretty regularly, we have to have people that help clean them up. Those people are called Environmental Engineers. Environmental Engineers are in charge of helping clean up oil spills and improving polluted environments. This helps environments be able to provide water, food, and needed nutrients once again.

Oil spills take a lot of work to clean-up. Skimmers are the main tools used to clean them. There are two main types of skimmers. Those are oil skimmers and weir style skimmers. An oil skimmer is a machine that take out the floating oil and grease using a tube, rope, mop, or disk. Weir style skimmers use a large pump to collect all of the floating oils. The oil is squeezed out or scraped off into a recovery tank. Machines like skimmers help save workers a lot of time in cleaning.