The Slick-Licker

The ways of treating oil spills are many and mysterious. Some involve nothing more than sopping up the mess with absorbent straw or raking in spills with floating booms; others involve complicated machines that vacuum oil-drenched sand. All have two things in common: they are painstakingly slow and they often leave as much oil behind as they pick up.

Thanks to a Canadian invention called the Oilevator, grimy beaches and greasy seagulls may soon be a thing of the past --provided the machine, nicknamed the "slick-licker," can get to the scene on time. The brainchild of Canadian Engineer Richard Sewell, the licker passed its biggest test last year when a tanker was grounded in Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia, and began gushing oil.

Ferried out to the spill on small landing craft, four lickers extended their long, conveyor belt "tongues" to the oil. A whir of machinery, and the absorbent material on the belt spun into the oil and sopped it up. Heavy rollers at the end of the conveyors then squeezed out the oil into 45-gallon drums. In ten weeks about 200,000 gallons of oil had been lapped up. The licker is doubly effective because its conveyor belt is coated with oil prior to deployment. The result is that the tongue repels surrounding water and gobbles up only oil.

Oilevator is dirt cheap (about $7,500 per machine), and it has worked so well that a government task force has recommended that at least one slick-licker be placed in each Canadian port.

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