The containment, removal, and cleanup of spilled oil are among the most difficult and most misunderstood problems in ocean engineering. The present difficulties are both technological (because physical and chemical understanding of some of the phenomena is incomplete) and sociological (because many untrained people wrongly believe that the problem is simple enough to be solved in short order with present-day technology). Except in a few highly specialized areas—offshore oil well drilling among them—business and government have devoted far less capital expenditure to ocean engineering than to other fields of engineering. For this reason, ocean engineering is a backward field in the sense that many potential areas for technological development have not been pursued to the extent possible. The containment, removal, and cleanup of spilled oil is one such area. The application of modern technology to this problem did not begin on any large scale until the aftermath of the Torrey Canyon disaster in 1967.

There are many reasons why oil spill cleanup problems are so difficult. There is a lack of understanding of the physics and chemistry underlying some of the pollution control difficulties. Some oil slicks cover tens of square miles. Currents and waves generate enormous forces on equipment. The logistics of dealing with something so large and so mobile in the face of the large forces of the sea are staggering. The area of the earth susceptible to an oil spill is large, and spills occur at random. To understand the difficulty of dealing with such a problem, one can compare a spill that happens unexpectedly a hundred miles offshore during a severe storm with the launching of a space vehicle from a known position under laboratory conditions following a predetermined countdown procedure in ideal weather. If a storm should occur, the launching of a space vehicle can be delayed, but for a ship it may be precisely such a storm that causes a polluting accident. Asked for his honest recommendation for dealing with a large spill at sea, a former tanker captain from one oil