Monday, June 7, 2010
Operation Clam can fix the Oil Spill on June 7th.
Pumping water out of the bays in large enough concentrations could cause a reverse flow in the delta.
Once the reverse flow started the ocean water could be captured with Booms: large floating barriers that round up oil and lift the oil off the water, skimmers would skim the oil, sorbents would absorb oil, Chemical and biological agents would help to break down the oil, vacuums would remove oil from beaches and filtered with a large number of clams and then forced out by the pumps.The bays of the delta would be operating very similarly to a giant clam.
River flows have been reversed before through locks. The canal that reversed the flow of the Chicago river took eight years to build in 1892. If we could do this in 1892 what could we accomplish with the Mississippi river today? In 1812 the Mississippi actually ran backward after an earthquake. There is evidence the the world's largest river, the Amazon, once flowed in the opposite direction from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Perhaps we would only need to reverse the flow at the top 3 inches of the water to gather 70% of the spillage.
Time is not on our side. Hurricane season in the gulf has already begun on June 1st. As I write this BLOG there is no indication of hurricanes right now. This can rapidly change. We need a new strategy that will remove the bulk of the slick before the slick is even more disbursed.