experience speaks
{ I-10 Corridor }
WHO: Darryl Carpenter AGE: 54
Nothing to Sneeze At
INDUSTRY: Construction YEARS IN BUSINESS: 21
If Darryl Carpenter is right, old hay could help soak up the Gulf’s epic oil spill by jason dehart
T
he well is capped, and the infamous oil slick staining the Gulf may be dissipating naturally, but if something like the Deepwater Horizon accident happens again, Darryl Carpenter hopes an idea of his will have a better hearing. Carpenter, 54, of Bristol in Liberty County, is vice president of C.W. Roberts Contracting, a highway paving company that has been in business for 35 years and currently has annual revenues of about $200 million. He is an area manager and has run the Freeport division for about 10 years. All told, Carpenter has been with the company for 21 years. “We originally put an office here when St. Joe Company started building WaterColor,” he said, referring to the premier landmark sea village built a decade ago. “(C.W. Roberts) is a major road contractor in Florida. We have seven offices from Fort Myers to Freeport. We do road paving, grading, site work and utility work. We’ve done work for the U.S. Air Force at Eglin and also for
Photo by SCOTT HOLSTEIN
the Army Corps of Engineers.” Probably one of the company’s most notable and recent paving projects, Carpenter said, was the work it did for the new Beaches of Northwest Florida Airport in Panama City. Credentials like these, forged from years of “in the arena” work, ought to give Carpenter and his team a certain amount of clout among other engineers. He hoped to parlay that clout into helping British Petroleum and the U.S. Coast Guard find a way to soak up the millions of gallons of oil that came to the surface of the northern Gulf of Mexico from a wellhead some 5,000 feet down. But now that the well is under control, Carpenter’s idea may have to wait. During the crisis, all sorts of quirky ideas for either sealing the spewing pipe itself or absorbing the surface oil came from the blogosphere or from armchair engineers. One idea for cleaning up the surface involved using booms of pantyhose stuffed with hair clippings. Another called for inflating tire tubes inside the pipeline.
Perhaps the most drastic, off-the-cuff idea for sealing the gusher itself involved detonating a nuclear bomb at the wellhead — something that was never seriously considered by U.S. officials. The U.S. Coast Guard captured surface oil little by little and set it ablaze to burn it up, and oil booms were deployed to protect various coastal areas. Carpenter hoped his idea isn’t something to sneeze at. His plan called for taking some old feed hay, sending it out on barges and boats to the nearest oil sheen, and blowing it into the water. There, wind and wave action would blend the hay with the oil, and after a period of hours or days, the hay would soak up the oil. Once sufficiently absorbed, the hay would be recovered and hauled off to an incinerator. Carpenter knows it works — at least on a small scale. He came up with the idea one day just driving along the highway. “I was riding along, thinking about ways to help clean it up,” he said. “We use a lot of hay
850 Business Magazine
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AUGUST – SEPTEMBER 2010
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