Those sausage-looking things are actually hairbooms: pantyhose stuffed with human hair that can be tossed into the water to contain an oil spill. Sounds absurd, but it's one of the few known ways to contain them, and the technique was used for the Exxon Valdez mess in 1989, and in the Cosco Busan spill of 2007. Containing a spill is, after all, a first step in cleaning it up.