With the impending threat of a growing oil slick just offshore, US Gulf coast states are clutching at all straws to avert disaster — with police in north Florida even suggesting protecting beaches with rolls of hay.
“That’s why we get a lot of inventions in wartime, because people are willing to take a chance,” Eric Smith, an oil and gas expert at Tulane University in New Orleans, said of the flood of ideas on how to stop the spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
On Florida’s Santa Rosa Beach, Walton County Sheriff Michael A. Adkinson and C.W. Roberts, a private contractor, unveiled their audacious plan to stop oil from blackening 42km of pristine white beaches facing the Gulf.
The three-stage plan involves floating barges several kilometers offshore — filled with giant 635kg rolls of hay. The barges — equipped with blowers — then spray the hay into the oily waters.
“The hay will clump together with the oil and make it easier to remove the waste from the water,” Sheriff’s spokesman Mike Gurspan said.
Despite more than two weeks of attempts using undersea robots and other high technology, BP has failed to stop oil from gushing up from the sunken wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
The structure sank 67km off the Louisiana coast on April 22, two days after a fiery explosion left 11 crew members missing and presumed dead, and the ensuing spill has spewed oil into the Gulf by 795,000 liters a day.
So with BP engineers publicly flummoxed by the challenges of mechanically repairing complex machines hundreds of meters down in the Gulf, a frustrated public has undertaken its own search to defend its coastal treasures from the widening spill.
BP maintains an online venue where the general public can submit ideas at the central command Web site deepwaterhorizonresponse.com.
Submission are forwarded to a technical desk for engineers to sort through them.
“To the extent that they act on them, I have no idea — but they have flown in experts from around the world to collaborate and contemplate the ideas that are presented,” BP spokesman Bryan Ferguson said on Sunday at the joint information center at Robert, Louisiana.
Smith said BP’s solicitation of public input (including a toll free number) may be “designed to fend off criticism” of the firm’s responsibility for the environmental crisis.
“I’m sure there are some good ideas and a lot of other ideas that might not be so practical,” he said.
The Florida plan, Gurspan said, exceeds preparations in other states, which require thousands of meters of absorbent boom.
“Booms are 90 percent ineffective in open water,” he said, adding that if the oil slick contaminates Florida’s rare coastal dune lakes the effect would be catastrophic.
“We don’t know if it will work or not but everybody wants something to do — and people deserve an effort,” Gurspan said.
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