and we are the point of contact for ten skimmers that have been working throughout the day today, for 15 miles we went to the west, now 15 miles going back. we did manage to skim some small amount of sheen with two smaller vessels of opportunity that had some absorbant boom, but that has been the extent of it. and in part because one, we have to bring you these live pictures, which are quite phenomenal. take a look at that air ship. that is spectacular, one of the more interesting and impressive tools now, weapons in the arsenal against this oil spill. and we see sunshine and blue skies, the seas have been relatively rough. so it s never easy and as of right now or a few minutes ago, they re pretty much ending skimming operations. so that s what s been going on here. it s been a phenomenal process to watch. ali, the coordinated effort that is this clean-up here in the gulf of mexico, which will continue for some weeks to come, but with the added help of that air ship, that amber and
good morning, admiral. you had mentioned skimming vessels. did that total include vessels of opportunity, and can you give a basic assessment of what you think the current it does include vessels of opportunity to the extent that they are pulling a piece of skimming equipment that is large enough that we could track as a skimmer, if you will. there are other ways to skim oil using vessels of opportunity, by towing an absorbant boom. we are trying to track skimmers as a major piece of machinery and whether or not they operate inshore offshore or near the well site. i think we have a pretty good fix now on what is going to be happening over the next 6, 24 and 48 hours.
past this absorbant boom. some of it is clearly soiled and it s playing some role. but we didn t drive over boom to get here, there s obviously a big break in it and this stuff is not set up in a way that looks like it can be effective. booming isn t worthless, it s just being done in a worthless way, right? it s not as efficient as the technology could provide. what we need are more people out on the ground implementing and maintain being the boom in place. and there s certainly thousands of people potentially available to implement boom effectively if they were trained and if they were deployed well, then we would have much more protection than what we have right now. so big picture, as research and development in the oil industry have been devoted almost solely in the big picture toward drilling, toward more production and not toward mitigation and cleanup efforts, mitigation and cleanup technology has stayed the same.
boom, right? well, how much of that boom looks like what i saw on my trip to the gulf? untethered from its pickets, unanchored, piled up on the shore doing absolutely nothing because nobody s around to maintain it. if you know absolutely nothing about how to use boom to protect shoreline from oil, from anything encroaching that you want to keep off that shoreline, if you know absolutely nothing about it, you probably still know enough to know that this isn t supposed to be what it looks like. what we re seeing right here, we re in cam nada bay, you can see these bamboo poles sticking up, in this big line here, the poles stretch behind me. those poles are supposed to be the anchor holding that absorbant boom in place. it s not working all that well. we re here with dr. mike blum from tulane, professor of