Company News

By Kevin Spears, For the Associated Press, Courtesy of The Mercury.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Nearly a mile of newly made oil-containment boom, which provides a final and desperate line of defense against an enormous slick in the Gulf of Mexico, gets trucked out of a small factory in Cape Canaveral each day.

“We’re maxed out,” said Sean Geary, sales manager at American Boom & Barrier Corp. “I’ve probably turned down 300,000 feet of orders.”

Ever since the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded and sank more than three weeks ago, boom manufacturers have ...

By Dominick Tao, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Sunday, June 6, 2010

Those bright orange, yellow and red oil-containment booms you see on the news symbolize the fight against the unfolding environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

TV shots show booms stretched for miles along imperiled coastlines, sometimes wrapped around entire islands. Someday, the booms may be needed here.

The question is: Will there be enough to go around? As reports have painfully documented, nobody prepared for an accident of this magnitude. No one set aside a massive stockpile of booms.

So the ...

Nick Naayers, 46, is vice president of American Boom & Barrier Corp. in Cape Canaveral, one of a small number of companies making the floating booms used to contain oil from the BP PLC well in the Gulf of Mexico. He spoke with Sentinel staff writer Kevin Spear.

CFB: You’ve seen the unprecedented surge in orders for your floating boom persist for nearly three months now. Is it possible somehow to have too much boom business?

Of course not.

CFB: How much boom ...