Desperate times call for desperate measures. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, that means hair bombs and junk shots.
San Francisco-based non-profit organisation has led an effort to stuff into nylon stockings to help mop up the mess.
Meanwhile, BP – the company ultimately responsible for the mess – is injecting scraps of rubber tyres, golf balls and other debris into valves on the sea floor that have thus far . Though company officials claim otherwise, the plan smacks of a last-ditch act of desperation by oilmen who failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
Last ditch? Not quite. There have been far more extreme responses to human-made and natural disasters in the past.
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1. Nuke it
To cap oil well blowouts, the . The USSR carried out at least five controlled nuclear blasts between 1966 and 1981 to extinguish well fires and bury the leaks in a gigantic pile of rubble. The first blast, a 30-kiloton bomb detonated 6Â kilometres underground in southern Uzbekistan, was roughly one-and-a-half times the size of the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, in world war 2. Of the five known blasts, all but one succeeded in capping the uncontrolled well.
2. Burn, bomb, napalm
When one of the first supertankers, the , ran aground off Cornwall, UK, in 1967, government officials as a method of containment. The Royal Navy then dropped 42 bombs on the ship. When that failed to sink it, the Royal Air Force dropped cans of aviation fuel on the wreck. High tides soon put out the blaze, so the armed forces followed up with a napalm attack before the ship eventually sank.
3. Plug it
Indonesia’s National Mudflow Mitigation Team near Sidoarjo on the island of Java in early 2007 in an attempt to stop mud flows that had displaced thousands of people. There is an ongoing debate over whether the mud flows were triggered by an earthquake or by drilling for a gas exploration well. The concrete balls failed to stop the flow and the approach was abandoned after several months.
4. Re-route it
When lava threatens to take out a town, governments have tried all sorts of diversionary tactics. Hawaii, Italy, Iceland and Japan have . In most cases the diversions offer only a brief reprieve before the lava continues on its original path. A notable success was achieved, however, when Italian authorities blasted mount Etna’s flow with TNT in the early 1990s. , saving the town of Zafferana.
5. Move it
Lanzhou, a Chinese industrial city in a valley surrounded by mountains, . Government officials recently tried to clear the air by . It wasn’t until they had already carted away the top half of the mountain that the group realised their efforts would have little effect on the city’s air quality.
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