They’ve got fixes for the oil spill, if BP will listen

Scientists, business owners and locals, some 3,700 of them, have phoned in tips to BP’s hotline offering fix-it ideas to stop the massive gulf oil leak and clean up the slick.

Four men — from West Virginia, Maryland and Alberta, Canada — however, decided to take a more direct approach. They gathered Monday at a ragtag inn in this tiny bayou enclave watching the oil move west on television and hoped to score a personal meeting with a BP representative to make their pitch like some traveling salesmen.

“We have the ability to protect the marshlands,” said Wayne Bennett, inventor and founder of ESSI, a Canadian company that pounds rubber tires into a lint-like material that soaks up oil. “We could be applying it right now.”

Gunther Schafer, a German engineer, became impatient e-mailing BP his idea: Use a three-part hydraulic claw to flatten the leaking pipe and stop the flow.

“I have been trying for days to get through to the [Deepwater] Horizon team, but too many people are trying the same,” said Schafer, who lives in Neuwied, Germany.

The men may be waiting a while to give their pitch, part of a throng of business owners, inventors and attorneys who have converged in coastal Louisiana hoping to grab a job or sell an idea. Highway billboards advertise lawyers willing to help file damage claims. The phone at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has likewise been ringing with callers offering cleanup ideas.

BP opened an Alternative Response Technology hotline in Houston, said spokesman Bryan Ferguson. The pitches are reviewed, and a few inventors — although Ferguson didn’t know how many — are asked to submit an online application.

By happenstance, the four men found one another at LeMatidora Inn, where bright yellow-and-blue macaws prance around the lobby floor, cawing. The business owners are hoping for a one-stop meeting with a BP representative.

On Monday, they sat near the pool at a table covered with maps — waiting for a call.

John Blumenthal had driven his truck all the way from Owing Mills, Md., pulling a trailer filled with his technology, an aeration device that would hang off shrimp boats and churn the water.

The president of Power House Inc. sat in his trailer for six hours outside the Deepwater Horizon oil spill command center in Houma, La., hoping to see someone. He has approached BP executives on the street, including the CEO, to pitch his device. Though Blumenthal said the chief executive seemed interested, he didn’t make a commitment.

“If we didn’t believe that we could help, and help a lot, we wouldn’t have started the trip,” said Blumenthal, a garrulous man who got the last room in the inn, the honeymoon suite.

Charles Lewey, chief executive of Mall Enterprises Inc. of Wheeling, W.Va., said his firm wanted to use a mulchlike substance called hydro weed to encapsulate the oil, causing it to float to the top and be collected.

“It’s difficult to introduce new technology in an emergency situation,” said Bennett, who has 30 years of experience in the oil industry.

Each time a cellphone rings, the hopeful look hopeful. All three business owners say their material is waiting on the tarmac, ready to be shipped to the gulf.

“Any minute now,” Lewey said, as Blumenthal got up from the table to answer a phone call. “We’re getting ready.”

alana.semuels@latimes.com