Oil giant, Coast Guard get gusher of cleanup ideas from public.
As BP engineers in the Gulf of Mexico scramble to contain a still-expanding oil slick, many people around the world are doing more than just watching anxiously. It turns out a lot of them have ideas about products, techniques and some novel approaches to cap the spill and clean the mess.
Some 5,000 suggestions have been submitted through an online suggestion box set up by the oil giant and the Coast Guard, and thousands more are circulating through YouTube videos, in Internet chat rooms and in e-mails sent to media organizations.
“It is just unbelievable,” said BP spokesman Mark Proegler. “People are not only offering products, we are getting a lot of calls — even here in the media center — from people with ideas on how to fix it. Anything ranging from crazy ideas to ones that actually sound sensible.”
Given that BP itself has tried or considered chemical dispersants, skimmer ships, boom barriers, a giant containment dome, a smaller “top hat,” a giant pipe to siphon off the oil and a “junk shot” to plug the leak, perhaps suggestions from the public might be welcome to deal with the spill gushing from the seabed since an April 20 explosion sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.