As engineers work to stop oil’s flow, thousands offer their own proposals

By Alana Semuels
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

BURAS, La. – Scientists, business owners and local citizens, some 3,700 of them, have phoned in tips to BP’s hot line offering fix-it ideas to stop the massive Gulf oil leak and to clean up slick.
Four men, however, decided to take a more direct approach. They gathered Monday at a ragtag inn in this tiny bayou enclave watching the oil move west on the television and hoped to score a personal meeting with a BP representative to make their pitch like some traveling salesmen.

“We have the ability to protect the marshlands,” said Wayne Bennett, founder and inventor of ESSI Inc., a Canadian company that pounds rubber tires into a lint-like material that soaks up oil. “We could be applying it right now.”

Gunther Schafer, a German engineer became impatient e-mailing BP his idea: using a three-part hydraulic claw to flatten the leaking pipe and stop the flow.

“I have been trying for days to get through the Horizon team, but too many people are trying the same,” said Schafer, who lives in Neuwied, Germany.

The men may be waiting a while to give their pitch, part of a throng of business owners, inventors, attorneys who have converged in coastal Louisiana hoping to grab a job or sell an idea. Highway billboards advertise attorneys willing to help file damage claims. The phone at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has likewise been ringing with callers offering cleanup ideas.

BP opened a hot line in Houston for Alternative Response Technologies, said spokesman Bryan Ferguson. The pitches are reviewed and a few inventors, although Ferguson didn’t know how many, are asked to submit an online application.

“By happenstance the four men found each other at La Matidora Inn, where bright yellow and blue macaws prance around the lobby floor, cawing. They business owners are hoping for one-stop meeting with a BP representative.

On Monday, they sat near the pool at a table covered with maps_waiting for a call.

John Blumenthal had driven his truck all the way from Owing Mills, Md., pulling a trailer filled with his technology, an aeration device that would hang off of shrimp boats and churn the water.

The president of The Power House Inc. sat in his trailer for six hours outside of a Deepwater Horizon command center in Houma, La., hoping to see someone. He has approached BP executives on the street, including the company CEO, to pitch his device. Though Blumenthal said the CEO seemed interested, he didn’t make a commitment.

“If we didn’t believe that we could help, and help a lot, we wouldn’t have started the trip,” said Blumenthal, a garrulous man who got the last room in the inn, the honeymoon suite.

Charles Lewey, the chief executive of Mall Enterprises Inc, a Wheeling, W.Va., company, said his firm wants to use a mulch-like substance called hydro weed to encapsulate the oil, causing it to float to the top and be collected.

Each time a cell phone rings, the hopeful look hopeful. They all say their material is waiting on the Tarmac, ready to be shipped to the Gulf.

“Any minute now,” Lewey said, as Blumenthal got up from the table to answer a phone call. “We’re getting ready.”

(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.

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