(Texas) -- South Austin trim carpenter Michael Riester woke up one morning this week with an idea on how to fix the oil leak ruining Louisiana and beyond.
And why not? BP couldn't unclog a toilet if you spotted them the plunger.
"If the Russkies can plug up Chernobyl with concrete, why can't we do it?" said Riester, 54. His plan is for BP to build a huge steel box, put a stovepipe hole on top, and blow concrete down a tube running into the stovepipe, which would force out the ocean water inside the steel box and plug up the leaking pipe.
That's his theory, and he's sticking to it. "The hot dog engineers will say it's not feasible," Michael said. "That's the first thing they're going to say. They're going to say it's archaic. But they've got to do anything to get this thing done. Hey, this might work."
Michael even drew some crude plan sketches on a legal pad. You've got your steel box, your front view, your top view, cables, sludge, stovepipe, your fins to hold the box in place in the ocean currents, rebar, and your ships on top of the water for artistic affect. Most of these items are available at Home Depot, right?
"I just threw some cheap-ass ships in there," Michael said. Still, he thinks his plan just might get the job done. "I've got a lot of common sense, and I'm a good carpenter, and all of a sudden I thought, bingo," he said.
I asked Michael how his steel box differs from the containment dome BP tried earlier, the dome that didn't work. "They did that? I didn't know," Michael said. "Maybe it wasn't heavy enough."
Still, he remains optimistic. "I think this'll work if we can get to the right people," he said. "I was getting tired of watching this on TV, and they're not doing anything."
Besides, "I drank too much coffee," he admitted.
Michael's not the first concerned American to come up with a plan, and what's the harm? Nothing the so-called experts have tried has fixed the problem. We still see pelicans cooking in oil on the evening news and hear fishermen whose lives have been destroyed. And what's BP doing? Spending money on a PR campaign. Here's one they haven't tried: "Oil — It's the New Sunscreen." So why shouldn't people be coming up with their own schemes to try to get some action?
There was the video swapped around on the Internet that showed the ol' boy in overalls putting hay in a bowl with oil and water, and, presto, the hay sucked up the oil. Even James Cameron, the Avatar director, held a brainstorming session with 20 scientists and engineers. That's right, the director of Avatar. We're all thinking about the solution until we're blue in the face. Me? I've been thinking we could do something with the nachos at Scholz Garten.
So we keep coming up with ideas like big steel boxes because nothing else has worked. It's like Riester said, quoting his brother: " ‘Can't' never got nothin' done."
"With the technology we've got, the resources this country has available, this could be done in a week or a week and a half," Riester said. Any plumbers out there with a better idea?
Source: John Kelso
Source: http://www.statesman.com/news/local/one-mans-fix-for-epic-bp-oil-spill-740590.html