The Bengal’s Oily Mess

Bell:

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Date:_____________ Name:_______________________________

INTRODUCTION: You are an environmental engineer working for the Cincinnati EPA (Environmental ProPaul Brown tection Agency). Voll Oil Inc., an oil disStadium tributor located west of Cincinnati, recently had a disastrous oil spill on the Ohio River. As an environmental engineer, it is your job to develop an Oil Removal Plan to remove all of the oil in the river. It is important that your removal plan be efficient and inexpensive—this means you must be able to reOil Spill move the oil quickly using inexpensive products. Voll Oil’s The oil spill has been contained (meaning it Barge will not flow down the river) and is located near Paul Brown Stadium. The oil spill is approximately 90 meters in diameter (295 feet) Due to the environmental dangers of the oil spill, the Bengal's game (Cincinnati vs. Pittsburg) will have to be cancelled—that is unless you and your environmental team are able to remove the oil prior to the game. So, your task for the next few days is to remediate (clean-up) the Voll Oil spill and learn about real-life oil remediation techniques.

GOALS: Students will be able to: 1. Design an oil removal plan to effectively and efficiently remove the oil from Voll Oil Incorporated’s oil spill. This design must use the “removal materials” provided in class. 2. Apply their knowledge of the properties of water and oil to design their oil removal plan. 3. Implement their team’s oil removal plan using a scale model. 4. Apply knowledge of real-world remediation techniques to the Bengal’s Oily Mess. 5. Recall what oil is used for as well as what causes oil spills 6. Describe the effects of oil spills on the environment and wildlife MATERIALS: • 1 small Petri dish • 1 large Petri dish • Stop Watch • 10 mL Cooking Oil • Graduated Cylinder • H2O • Plastic Waste bag

Clean-Up Materials Available: • Cotton Balls • Feathers • Soap • Straws • Coffee Filters • Sand • Leaves • Pebbles • Cornstarch • Powdered Sugar • Cardboard

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Part 1: Oil Removal Plan Directions: Using the materials made available to you, design an Oil Removal Plan. It is important not to remove any water (waste of time and money) when removing the oil from the spill. 1. What materials are you planning to use? Note: Perform mini tests using the small Petri dish to see how your materials react with oil and water Materials

Cost

Total Cost: ________________

2. Write a step-by-step procedure for your Oil Removal Plan. This procedure is your hypothesis. Recall that a hypothesis is an “educated guess” that is testable. Thus, as you are creating your procedure, you are “guessing” the best technique to remove oil from the spill. When you implement your Oil Removal Plan, you will be testing its effectiveness—testing your hypothesis.

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Part 2: Scale Model Removal Directions: Using the scale model oil spill, implement your Oil Removal Plan. 1. Create a scale model of the Voll Oil spill using the components below. Scale Model Components: 1 large Petri dish 20 mL of water 10 mL of oil 2. Collect and prepare all clean-up materials you plan to use in your Oil Removal Plan (see page 2 for your material list). When it comes to engineering and oil spills, time and efficiency are always a factor. Due to this, and in order to simulate the added pressure of time as a constraint, your team must time how long it takes them to remove all of the oil, from start to finish. 3. How long did your Oil Removal Plan take to implement? _______________________ A factor that engineers must take into account when designing and developing new technologies, manufacturing processes, and Oil Removal Plans is efficiency. Time is not the only indication of efficiency. Another measure, to which your team must report, is the total amount of oil removed. In order to document this, your team must measure the amount of water remaining in your Petri dish after the oil is removed. A 50 mL graduated cylinder can be used for this task. It is important that you remove all of the oil in your scale model, but at the same time, leave all of the water. Removing unnecessary water is a waste of time and money. 4. How much water remained in your Petri dish after the oil was removed? _______________________mL

5. Were you able to successfully remove all of the oil from your scale model?

6. What worked best (materials, techniques) at cleaning up the oil?

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Part 2: Scale Model Removal 7. What problems did you encounter when trying to clean up the oil?

8. What changes could you make to your Oil Removal Plan to make it better?

9. Redesign your Oil Removal Plan with the comments you made in questions 6-8. Write a step-by-step procedure for your new Oil Removal Plan incorporating those ideas. Write in complete sentences and use proper English. Materials

Cost

Total Cost ___________

10. Test your new Oil Removal Plan: Time: _______________ Water Remaining:______________mL 11. Was your new Oil Removal Plan more or less efficient than your first plan? Explain why.

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Part 3: Scale Models vs. The Real World Directions: In your experiment, you used a scale model to represent the Voll Oil spill. The scale of your model was 1cm = 1m. That means, the diameter of your Petri dish represented 90 meters (think of it as 90 meter sticks). With that in mind, consider the following questions: 1. Engineers do more than just design and develop structures, processes and procedures (like your oil removal plan) that are time and cost efficient. There are many other considerations (besides money and time) that an engineer must take into account when designing such things. What other considerations must you take into account when designing and implementing your oil removal plan?

2. Cleaning oil spills is difficult, even when you are doing it on a small scale - like we did today using your scale model. If it is difficult to clean up a small amount of oil, imagine how hard it would be to clean up thousands of gallons of oil in the actual Ohio River. What issues may arise from your oil removal plan? List three (3) issues you might encounter when attempting to clean thousands of gallons of oil from a river, lake, pond or an ocean.

3. Your scale model used 20 mL of oil to represent the Voll Oil spill. If the scale used to represent the oil is 1mL = 5,000 gallon, how many gallons of oil were actually spilled in the Ohio River? Show all calculations! Circle your answer

4. Usually only 15% (15 gallons out of every 100 gallons) of oil can be cleaned up from oil spills. The rest stays in the environment. If the Voll Oil spill contained 100,000 gallons of oil, how many gallons will the EPA be able to remove? How many gallons will remain in the Ohio River? Show all calculations! Circle your answer

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Directions: Read the following two (3) pages concerning oil spills. Underline or highlight any information that you think is interesting or important. When we talk about oil spills, how much oil are we talking about? Quite a lot: • • •

The United States uses about 700 million gallons of oil every day. The world uses nearly 3 billion gallons each day. The largest spill in the United States so far was the Exxon Valdez spill into Prince William Sound, Alaska in March 1989. An oil tanker ran aground to cause this spill of almost 11 million gallons of crude oil. While this was a big spill, it was actually only a small fraction— less than 2 percent—of what the United States uses in 1 day!

These big numbers are hard to relate to everyday life, so let's make some comparisons. To better understand how much 11 million gallons of oil is . It shows how many familiar rooms or buildings would be filled up by the approximate amount of oil spilled from the Exxon Valdez. For example, that oil would have filled up 9 school gyms or 430 classrooms. Total Volume

Gallons

Gym’s

Houses

Classrooms

Living Rooms

Exxon Valdez

10,800,000

>9

108

430

797

What do we use all this oil for? You may not be aware of all the ways we use oil. We use it • • • • •

to fuel our cars, trucks, and buses, and to heat our houses. to lubricate machinery large and small, such as bicycles or printing presses. to make the asphalt we use to pave our roads. to make plastics, such as the toys we play with and the portable radios or CD players we listen to. to make medicines, ink, fertilizers, pesticides, paints, varnishes, and electricity.

How do spills happen? Oil spills into rivers, bays, and the ocean are caused by accidents involving tankers, barges, pipelines, refineries, and storage facilities, usually while the oil is being transported to us, its users (as in the photo at right, which shows a supertanker, the Amoco Cadiz, sinking off the coast of France in 1978).

Spills can be caused by: • • • •

people making mistakes or being careless. equipment breaking down. natural disasters such as hurricanes. deliberate acts by terrorists, countries at war, vandals, or illegal dumpers. 6

The information found in this reading has been adapted from the National Ocean Service Office of Response and Restoration

Part 4: What’s the Story on Oil Spills?

Part 4: What’s the Story on Oil Spills? (continued) Then what happens?

All of the pictures on this page are from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Alaska—1989

Oil floats on salt water (the ocean) and usually floats on fresh water (rivers and lakes). Very heavy oil can sometimes sink in fresh water, but this happens very rarely. Oil usually spreads out rapidly across the water surface to form a thin layer that we call an oil slick. As the spreading process continues, the layer becomes thinner and thinner, finally becoming a very thin layer called a sheen, which often looks like a rainbow. (You may have seen sheens on roads or parking lots after a rain.) Depending on the circumstances, oil spills can be very harmful to marine birds and mammals, and also can harm fish and shellfish. You may have seen dramatic pictures of oiled birds and sea otters that have been affected by oil spills. Oil destroys the insulating ability of fur-bearing mammals, such as sea otters, and the waterrepelling abilities of a bird's feathers, thus exposing these creatures to the harsh elements. Many birds and animals also ingest (swallow) oil when they try to clean themselves, which can poison them. Depending on just where and when a spill happens, from just a few up to hundreds or thousands of birds and mammals can be killed or injured. Once oil has spilled, any of various local, state, and federal government agencies as well as volunteer organizations may respond to the incident, depending on who's needed. People may use any of the following kinds of tools to clean up spilled oil: • • • • • • • •

Booms, which are floating barriers to oil (for example, a big boom may be placed around a tanker that is leaking oil, to collect the oil). Skimmers, which are boats that skim spilled oil from the water surface. Sorbents, which are big sponges used to absorb oil. Chemical dispersants and biological agents, which break down the oil into its chemical constituents. In-situ burning, which is a method of burning freshly-spilled oil, usually while it's floating on the water. Washing oil off beaches with either high-pressure or lowpressure hoses. Vacuum trucks, which can vacuum spilled oil off of beaches or the water surface. Shovels and road equipment, which are sometimes used to pick up oil or move oiled beach sand and gravel down to where it can be cleaned by being tumbled around in the waves.

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Part 4: What’s the Story on Oil Spills? (continued) Which methods and tools people choose depends on the circumstances of each event: the weather, the type and amount of oil spilled, how far away from shore the oil has spilled, whether or not people live in the area, what kinds of bird and animal habitats are in the area, and other factors. Different cleanup methods work on different types of beaches and with different kinds of oil. For example, road equipment works very well on sand beaches, but can't be used in marshes or on beaches with big boulders or cobble (rounded stones that are larger than pebbles, but smaller than boulders). People also may set up stations where they can clean and rehabilitate wildlife. Sometimes, people may decide not to response at all to a spill, because in some cases, responding isn't helpful or even adds to the damage from the spill.

Who takes care of the problem? In the United States, depending on where the spill occurs, either the U.S. Coast Guard or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency takes charge of the spill response. They, in turn, often call on other agencies (NOAA and the Fish and Wildlife Service are often called) for help and information. The goal of new federal regulations is to prevent oil spills from happening. People who cause oil spills now must pay severe penalties, and the regulations also call for safer vessel design in the hopes of avoiding future spills. In the U.S., people who respond to oil spills must practice by conducting training drills, and people who manage vessels and facilities that store or transport oil must develop plans explaining how they would respond to a spill, so that they can respond effectively to a spill if they need to.

What about the rest of us? Because oil and oil products in the environment can cause harm, we need to prevent problems when we can. For example, by avoiding dumping oil or oily waste into the sewer or garbage, we avoid polluting the environment we live in. Sometimes, we can find ways to avoid using oil in the first place: for example, we can bicycle, walk, or take the bus rather than taking a car to some places we need to go. When we use less oil, less needs to be transported, and there's a lower risk of future oil spills. We should understand that it is because we rely on oil that we run the risk of oil spills. That means that all of us share both the responsibility for creating the problem of oil spills and the responsibility for finding ways to solve the problem.

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Part 5: The Bengals vs. Voll Oil Inc.

Vs.

The Bengals

CEO of Voll Oil Inc.

Directions: Using your knowledge of real-world remediation techniques and the effects of oil spills on the environment (you read about them on page 7 of this packet), answer the following questions: 1. The first thing you must do when attempting to clean-up an oil spill is to assess the situation. Assessing the situation means that you must document everything that you see. In five (5) sentences, write a short journal entry of what you might see at the Voll Oil spill just outside of Paul Brown Stadium. Remember that there is a picture of the Ohio River and Paul Brown on the first page of this activity.

2. What remediation (clean-up) techniques do you think would be most appropriate to clean the Bengal’s Oily Mess?

3. How would you clean the wildlife (birds, Bengal tigers, etc.) affected by the oil spill?

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Part 5: The Bengals vs. Voll Oil Inc. (cont.) Directions: Answer the following question using complete sentences. 4. After investigating the scene of the oil spill, a large piece of scrape metal, with the inscription “Cinergy Field” was found to have punctured Voll Oil’s barge, causing the disastrous oil spill. Recall that Cinergy Field (a.k.a The Red’s old stadium) was imploded December 29, 2002. Due to this information, who do you think should be required to pay for the oil spill clean up? Possible people that could be at fault are Voll Oil Inc., the Cincinnati Reds, O’Rourke Wrecking Company (the company in charge of imploding the stadium), the city of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Bengals, Hamilton County, Cincinnati EPA, or the State of Ohio? Justify your reason—that means explain why you think that person or persons should be responsible for paying the bill.

5. List five (5) environmental effects you think the Voll Oil spill could have on the environment, wildlife, other states, or on the future uses of the water in the Ohio River ?

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