ORANGE BEACH, Ala., — BP’s Sand Shark beach cleaning machine is the latest device to be used to help make the white beaches of Alabama’s Gulf Coast white again.

Looking like something you might see along with a road construction crew on a new stretch of highway, the $300,000 large Sand Shark can go 18 inches deep to remove oil particles from the sand.

“This is kind of a glorified beach cleaning system like the ones we have been using,” said Ken Grimes, city administrator in Orange Beach. “It is much more heavy duty, pulled by a huge conveyor type machine like you would see pulling up asphalt and running it back to the truck.

Grimes said that BP’s Mobile Incident Commander, Keith Seilhan, was on hand at the demonstration on Tuesday, saying  additional machines would be available in the future.

“It won’t be able to do anything with the liquid oil along the shoreline, and I’m not sure how they are going to remove that contaminated sand and replace it with clean sand,” Grimes said.

Still, Grimes said  city officials hope the new machine will be successful, and they also hope it will stay and be used in Orange Beach, although city employees will not be needed to operated the Sand Shark.

“They will use their people to run it,” Grimes said.

Orange Beach will continue to use their beach cleaning machines as well.

In Gulf Shores, Mayor Robert Craft said that after discussions with ADEM and BP, the beach cleaning effort has been scaled back.

“They are not going to send people out looking for contamination, but when tarballs are discovered, there will be crews available to show up and collect those,” Craft said.

Craft said that they, too, would continue to run their beach cleaning machines.

“The cleanup effort is now very site specific rather than people running up and down the beach looking for oil,” Craft said.