SLIDELL, La. — It just might work.
A young Long Island genius took her oil-spill fix down to the Gulf yesterday, cornering a BP executive at a cleanup staging area and knocking his socks off during a half-hour powwow.
“Wow, that’s very impressive,” Dave Golson, BP’s operations director for eastern Louisiana, said after hearing Alia Sabur’s pitch. “It’s something we should give serious consideration.”
The 21-year-old prodigy, who’s close to completing her Ph.D. in engineering, grew so frustrated watching the company’s repeated failure to plug the leak that she set her off-the-charts IQ to the task last week. Her plan calls for welding deflated auto tires to a pipe, inserting the contraption into the gusher and inflating the tires with hydraulic fluid to form a seal.
A valve in the pipe could be closed to stop the flow of oil completely or opened to allow it to flow to a ship on the surface.
Yesterday, as the company frantically tried to pull off its latest plan to stem the flow of oil — cutting off the damaged pipe and using a containment vessel to pump the crude to a ship on the surface — a determined Sabur pulled Golson aside to offer up an alternative.
“I think I have a really good idea,” she told the exec, who was talking to a Coast Guard official at the time.
Golson, who said the company has been inundated with some 30,000 ideas to kill the spill, was about to brush her off.
But after she showed him a Wednesday edition of The Post, which contained a schematic of her proposal, he reconsidered.
“This looks similar to what we did a few weeks back with the insert pipe,” he said. “Is this different?”
“Yes,” Sabur explained. “The idea is, if you have a whole array of tires it becomes a seal. It is the redundancy of the tires and the strength of the tires — they are good because they’re meant to withstand a lot.”
Golson paused to look at the plans a little more closely, and then he looked up at Sabur.
“Where did this idea come from?” he asked.
“From me,” she told him.
“From you? That’s impressive,” he said.
Additional reporting by Jeremy Olshan