SH – BP hires 12-year-old to help come up with ideas to plug leak … really?
An absolutely true news item: British Petroleum says it is considering a plan to plug the main leak on the sunken Deepwater Horizon oil rig by shooting it full of shredded car tires, old golf balls and knotted ropes.
BPannounced today that it has fired its top engineer for safety design and replaced him with Jody McNamara, age 12, a sixth-grade honors student at the Dwight Eisenhower Middle School in Tulsa, Okla.
McNamara, who will earn about $350,000 a year in salary and stock options, was offered the BP job after a panel of industry experts selected his 250-word essay, “How To Stop Undersea Oil Leaks Really Quick,” over thousands of other entries.
“Jody is clearly on the cutting edge of deepwater energy technology,” said BP chief executive Tony Hayward. “We couldn’t be happier to have him join our team at such a critical time.”
In his winning essay, McNamara proposed several possible options for sealing the ruptured oil pipeline. He said the most promising plan would require “a super-long straw” and approximately 3,700 metric tons of Quaker oatmeal.
“You ever let that goop sit in a cereal bowl for an hour or two? It turns to rock,” the sixth-grader explained at his press conference. “There’s nothing that stuff won’t clog up.”
McNamara said he successfully tested the technique using a homemade Lego model of the Deepwater Horizon, submerged in a 30-gallon aquarium in his brother’s bedroom.
“Don’t worry, we took out all the fish first,” he said.
Hayward later conceded that the aquarium experiment was more sophisticated than any that BP had undertaken. “It could have saved us the fortune that we blew on that stupid dome,” he added ruefully.
Read more: http://www.sunherald.com/2010/05/17/2187878/bp-oil-spill-and-a-little-child.html#ixzz0oTTAfCcW
Magnolia Tribune
