Last modified: Saturday, June 26, 2010 11:00 PM CDT

Gulf oil spill: Raising awareness

By JENNA MINK, The Daily News, jmink@bgdailynews.com/783-3246

On a hot Saturday afternoon, Claudia Hanes donned a pair of green, peace-sign sunglasses as she stood on a public sidewalk, spouting a message about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the way it’s being handled.

“I think it’s atrocious,” said Hanes, of Bowling Green. “I think it’s incredibly stupid for the human species to think that, in any form, this is OK.”

Hanes held hands with about 40 other residents as they stretched across a sidewalk near The Medical Center. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Bowling Green, along with BG Green and the national organization Hands Across the Sand, organized the 15-minute demonstration to raise awareness about the crisis in the Gulf. Hands Across the Sand, which opposes offshore drilling, held at least three other protests in Kentucky on Saturday.

The Bowling Green group promoted better incentives for fossil fuels and other alternative energies, and called for an end to offshore drilling. A federal judge recently struck down the Obama administration’s six-month ban on deepwater drilling.

“I think BP’s use of our waters is just reckless and wanton endangerment,” said Jennifer Hundley-Batts, of Bowling Green. “I think our waters and our coasts belong to all of us. I think they are national treasures. I think anything that brings harm to them should be considered a national security issue.”

The group is part of a growing number of local residents who are getting involved in the oil spill issue in their own way. On April 20, BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 workers and spewing millions of gallons of oil into the ocean in what has since become the biggest oil spill in the nation’s history.

Since then, officials have been unable to stop the spill and oil continues to spread into parts of the Gulf, endangering ecosystems.

Oil has reached landfall at several coastlines stretching from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. It’s unclear how much oil is spewing from the well, but some experts estimate that up to 150 million gallons have leaked into the ocean, according to reports.

So far, company workers have failed to stop the leak, although they claim that they are collecting oil through new technology and expect the leak to end by August. Workers put a cap on the pipe that the oil is leaking from. They’ve recently begun collecting oil from another pipe that’s connected to the top of the well, according to reports.

But a Bowling Green oil businessman thinks he might have a solution.

While the details are still murky, Pete Barber is drawing designs for his compression packer - a system that inserts a pipe directly into the well, allowing the oil to spew through the pipe and empty into a boat.

“It’s all wishy washy. But it’s like it’s OK for the whole coastline of the United States to get ruined because they’re not, in my opinion, doing anything about it. They’re trying to put a house over it. I mean, come on,” he said about the cap method. “I’m not killing the well (with my invention). I’m diverting the flow of the well.”

Barber has been in the oil business his entire life. His father was a petroleum geologist at the University of Tulsa and, when Barber was 6 years old, his father got into the oil business, purchasing a few rigs and drilling water wells. Now Barber has taken over the family business, dubbed Barber Drilling Co., servicing about 15 wells around Warren County, he said.

While the details are still sketchy - Barber said he’s unsure of the cost to build such a contraption - he’s convinced his plan could work. His proposed operation entails much more than simply sticking a pipe into the well, but he’s hammering out the details and has contacted a representative of the governor of Florida who’s interested in reviewing the designs, Barber said.

“Just imagine a snow cone with a hole in the bottom of it, and at the top just an open piece of pipe with valves on it,” he said. “This thing down here in the coast, this is awful and it’s worth a try.”

Barber said he believes the government should play a bigger role in stopping the leak and cleaning the mess.

“Why hasn’t the United States government taken a bunch of people, or some people with good ideas, and taken the well from British Petroleum?” he said.

Meanwhile, other residents are raising awareness of the catastrophe, even though its effects are felt hundreds of miles away. As they clutched one another’s hands, the demonstrators held signs with messages such as, “Don’t Be an Oil Glutton.”

“I just think it’s a perfect opportunity to show some unity for folks on the Gulf,” said Valerie Brown, of Bowling Green. “I understand, at the current time, we can’t stop (drilling). But we can continue to look for very safe ways to drill and look for alternative energy sources.”

Hanes said she believes workers should stop offshore drilling until officials develop a way to prevent such disasters.

“I do think there’s power in awareness, and people who don’t even live in the Gulf are doing these events,” she said. But, if oil continues to seep into beaches and wetlands across the coast, “we’re going to need all of Bowling Green in this field.”