BP oil spill: Five outside-the-box solutions to capping and cleanup

As the Los Angeles Times reports, Costner's machine isn't the first from a movie star inventor. In addition to Costner, the paper lists "Tigger" voice actor Paul Winchell, who patented an early artificial heart in the 1960s, and movie star Hedy Lamarr, who co-invented an unjammable radio system for use in World War II.

4. Call in the Dutch. A month after the Dutch government offered to make available six of its oil-catching "sweeping arm systems" for use in containing the growing oil spill, that equipment is now making its way to the Gulf. The system has been successfully used to fight oil spill disasters involving the Sea Empress in 1996 off the coast of Wales and the Prestige accident off the coast of Spain in 2002.

5. Houston's "MacGyver" to the rescue? Houston inventor Steven Dvorak says he has begged BP to take note of his as-yet-unpatented contraption, which he calls SQUID. That's short for Super Quick Undersea Incident Device. It's a "heavy ring attached to a soft reinforced tube to gather the oil as it floats up to the surface," reports Sarah Rufca, from Culture Map Houston.

Here's Mr. Dvorak explaining how it works on YouTube.

BP is currently wading through more than 8,000 suggestions from people around the world on how to kill the well and corral the already-released oil.

Related:

• BP oil spill spreads toward Pensacola, as wildlife toll rises
• Before BP oil spill, Big Oil-led study urged feds to cut safety testing
• BP oil spill: Undersea lumberjack gets saw snagged in pipe

Previous

1 | 2