Water on Fire: Controlled Burns of Spilled Oil

People here in the oil's bull's-eye need a lot more help than just protective boom. So out in the Gulf, smoke is a signal that less oil's coming ashore.

Fire on the water: It's oil, burning in towering columns of smoke and flame. Sixty miles into the Gulf is one of BP's frontline defenses against floating oil reaching shore reports CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann.

Special Section: Disaster in the Gulf

"As far as the front line goes, you can't get more front than this," says oil spill expert Al Allen.

This is by far the biggest controlled burn in history. Sometimes multiple fires burn at once. They resemble a roaring tornado of flames.

Up close there's a sound this burning oil makes, a crackling, bubbling noise like a Fryolator along with a whooshing noise from the flame tornados inside the bigger fire. The heat is intense. Flame temperatures can reach 2,000 degrees. That's hot enough to melt steel, and with so much oil in these waters some of these fires burn for more than six hours.

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Here's how the operation works. From a plane, spotters like Al Allen look for long streamers of heavy crude and direct shrimp boats with fire resistant boom down below into position.

"We talk to pilots and we talk to captains on the boats and we vector them into the oil," says BP engineer Nere Mabile.

The shrimpers corral the oil, what they call "the pudding." Then they wait for the "igniter boat."

Controlled burn igniter Anthony Verdin lights the flare that melts a jug filled with kerosene and accelerant gel. It ignites the oil. Within minutes a small fire can become a massive one. Big fires burn off 2,000 gallons a minute.

"Sometimes they get bigger. Sometimes they get smaller. It's never the same fire," says Verdin.

So far these fires have burned more than 4.5 million gallons of oil. That's only a fraction, maybe three days worth, of BP's overall leak. Every gallon burned is one less gallon making landfall on someone's coastline.

Coordinators of those burns say breathing that smoke is less dangerous than smoking cigarettes, but it is a nuisance.

[sharoncalla]

I will be so glad when this oil spill is over, and I hope we can make a complete recovery. Perhaps, when the oil is gone and the water has been cleaned and inspected, we can transfer fresh sea foods from Northern areas. Also, I agree with Obama no more deep water oil drilling. The disaster for our waters has been most devastating and we should never want this "repeated". Hurricanes that may come in may still throw the stuff inland, so godspeed with the cleaning, and God Bless the USA.

[nojoy01]

Poor BP. They can have more oil on the beaches where everybody can see it or put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I know. Let's ask CBS how many tons of co, co2, etc., etc., etc. burning 4 million gallons of crude produces.

[sorerect]

I know it's not a pretty sight but they should have been doing this all along. It will reduce the volatile compounds and decrease the environmental shore impact. This is a good call and "lesser of two evils" when compared to blowing tremendous amounts of dispersant into the oil and then let it drift towards the beaches and marsh lands.

[aubfmet]

This looks like the smartest treatment I've seen so far.

[CincyJazzy]

Yep...it will cost BP, but it will work to control the spread.

[newsterI]

Oh yeah, REAL smark, pollute the air with HUGE clouds of toxic thick black acrid smoke, they are only doing this because its CHEAP to burn it than collect it and dispose of contaminates.

"Flame temperatures can reach 2,000 degrees. That's hot enough to melt steel,"

Bull, 2,000 degrees is NOT hot enough to melt steel, where do these editors come up with that BS, 2,000 degrees F is barely enough to melt copper, and will only heat steel red, if an oil fire melted steel then your oil burning furnace would melt! Steel melts around 2500 degrees

[rightbehind]

Burning it is the smart thing to do. It will be easier to recover as tar.

[kenhamlett]

"Coordinators of those burns say breathing that smoke is less dangerous than smoking cigarettes,"

I would like to see the proof behind that statement. It is a little too much like their original spill estimates to be believed.