effectiveness. today results are in. of. and like so many things in this disaster, the answer isn't black or white. to new orleans now and cnn's senior correspondent, allen chernoff. allen, "a whale" a success? >> reporter: well, we'll have to see. we just don't know yet. there was some testing done, as you said, over the weekend. the thing is, the seas out there were so high, 7-foot seas on saturday, at least 5 feet yesterday that it was a little tough to test this baby. i mean, it is massive, tony. i saw it from the air on saturday. you're flying over, we were 500 feet up. that thing is more than three-and-a-half football fields long. the thing is built to be an oil tanker. it was retrofitted. it doesn't work the way normal skimmers work. it sucks up all the oil and water, and then is supposed to separate them on board. and then spit out the water. so the testing involves checking out how well it actually can do