Clean up the oil spill with hay

I recall reading a few years ago that human hair could be used the same way. It seems there are a lot of natural materials that work well for absorbing oil; I'm not sure if this is what's used in the "oil absorbing booms" the Coast Guard's been deploying, but these are made from wood: <a href="http://www.clear-passage.com/absorb.html#anchor799344" rel="nofollow">http://www.clear-passage.com/absorb.html#anchor799344</a>.<p>As a side note, I think it's cool that this was presented by a guy with a Southern (US) accent and overalls. Hopefully this will do some small part to breaking the stereotype that people with a Southern accent are not intelligent.

Good write up on why the hay might not work: <a href="http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2010/05/hay-for-oil-spill-is-no-plan.html" rel="nofollow">http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2010/05/hay-for-oil-spill-...</a>

This seems like a much better solution than dispersing chemical agents into the water. KISS.

Simple solutions are quite often the best. I do not see a problem with this as it does make perfect sense. Oil floats but is not a solid and hay is a very textured solid that would affix itself to oil pretty strongly (think getting oil on your hands vs on a pane of glass).

In one of the videos the guy mentioned that back in the 90's there was a reason that A LOT of hay needed to be sent to Montana or some other state in the northern midwest. He used that as an argument for why they could get enough hay. Does anyone know anything about that? I have been unsuccessful in my search on google.

Wait a second, how are we to clean up the hay?

They <i>are</i> currently using hay bales on the gulf's beaches as a barrier and absorbant.

I think we should take the annual salary of the managers who engineered, inspected and owned and operated the rig, convert it into dollar bills and use that to soak it up.<p>I'd like to see this work but seriously this demo is far too simple, show me a demo with a few hundred square feet with very light oil densities and much less hay available.