Twin brothers unveil beach cleaning machine
By PAUL KEDINGER
Managing Editor
Did the face on a recent advertisement in the Rayne Acadian-Tribune look familiar?
It should have, if you were a Notre Dame High School classmate or friends of his family.
The full-page color ad featured the face of Keith Seilhan, who is currently serving as incident commander for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill cleanup effort by British Petroleum following the disastrous explosion of the Deepwater Horizon well, the loss of 11 lives and subsequent oil spill that has been capped but not yet “killed”.
Keith and his twin brother, Kevin, were recently featured on a Fox TV news report from Orange Beach, Alabama, where BP demonstrated its newest beach cleaning device, the Sandshark, designed and created by a team led by Kevin Seilhan.
According to the brothers’ father, Keith convinced his brother, who is an independent contractor in San Antonio, Texas, to join him in Mobile, Ala., on the development and production of a prototype machine to clear beaches of tarballs and other debris associated with the massive oil spill.
The Sandshark has the capability of digging 18 inches down into the sand, and sifting every hydrocarbon that is two millimeters or larger out.
“I think the machine can work. You’ve seen and I think that’s pretty indicative of what it can do,” the team leader for the design, Kevin Seilhan said to the Fox News 10 reporter Libby Amos.
The Sandshark machine filters tarballs from once pristine beaches.
“It sifts the materials and in this case broken shells and small tarballs from anywhere from two millimeters to hand size and then from the back end, we can have it dump into a loader and have that unwanted material off the beach,” Seilhan explained.
The machine is engineered opposite of most beach cleaners, because it sifts sand first instead of pulling another machine behind it to sift. The purpose of this design is to prevent a heavy machine from rolling over oil and mashing it further down into the sand.
Mobile’s BP Incident Commander, Keith Seilhan, said BP is working on new techniques to get to sand that is deeper than 18 inches. He said some agriculture machinery may be used to dig deep and turn sand over so that The Sandshark can clean it out.
“For any contaminate that is deeper than what this machine can reach, which right now the limit is 18, it may go deeper. We can use agricultural implements like plows that actually gently will go in and turn the sand over and bring the bottom of the sand up and any contaminate will come with it,” Keith said.
BP officials said the Sandshark will travel between the Mississippi, Alabama and Florida beaches. The team of engineers who designed the machine and BP were to decide last week if they’ll build more Sandsharks.
BP also said money is not an issue and it will buy more of the machines if they’re needed.
The sons of Lee and Burna Seilhan of Rayne, grew up in Crowley where they graduated from Notre Dame High School and attended LSU-Baton Rouge.
Keith earned his degree in mechanical engineering and is a 20 year veteran of BP.
Kevin earned his degree in banking, with a minor in construction and is now the owner of Character House Construction in San Antonio.