Type "hair boom" into your browser and, with the exception of opinion pieces, you can read the same Associated Press article in newspapers across the country which announces the decision by BP and the U.S. Coast Guard not to use the hair booms made of donated human hair and animal fur to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf. "We foresee a risk that widespread deployment of the hair boom could exacerbate the debris problem," Coast Guard spokesman Petty Officer Shawn Eggert is quoted as saying.
How, exactly, would the hair booms exacerbate the debris problem?
According to an attractive fact sheet [PDF] by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), "Using Booms in Response to Oil Spills," a February 2010 field test revealed that "commercial sorbent boom absorbed more oil and much less water than hair boom, which became waterlogged and sank within an hour."
Enter Matter of Trust, the 6-person San Francisco based nonprofit that has mobilized volunteers, collected 20 warehouses full of hair, animal fur, nylons, crab traps, and other materials needed to construct the booms, and yes--conducted their own tests.
They found that not only did flotation improve when human hair was mixed with alpaca shearings, but that the hair booms (made of reused materials) absorbed and retained oil more effectively than the commercial sorbent booms (made of new materials, which of course cost money). And then here's the kicker: Matter of Trust wants to deploy the hair booms inside of crab traps with flotation devices that would prevent them from sinking to the bottom and "[exacerbating] the debris problem." How did the powers-that-be miss that one?
In the interest of disclosure, let me make it clear that I'm not there on the coastline of Louisiana, watching as a thin rainbow haze of oil washes ashore, the harbinger of the thick brown glaze to follow that will choke the life out of every living thing in its path. This is a layman's perspective, culled from the various resources available to me on the interwebs.
But journalist/blogger Summer Burkes is there, writing and working with Matter of Trust and Point-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana, locals to try to implement a home-spun, sustainable clean-up solution to which well-meaning folks near and far can contribute. Or at least thought they could... In addition to the outright hair boom prohibition, Summer reports that a $5,000 fine and up to a year in jail are in place for anyone who goes near the oil. She has written extensively (albeit colorfully) on the topic, so I'll refer you to her blog, The Ladies' Guide to the Apocalypse, if you want to read up on it more or see the pictures of Matter of Trust's hair-boom-versus-commercial-sorbent-boom experiment, which are quite convincing. (Hair and fur absorb oil; it's why animals get coated in oil, can't get it off, and then die.)
On a side note, writing on geographically distant topics here on the blog is a new avenue for me, but I was so upset after reading about these roadblocks and what Summer calls a "smear campaign" standing in the way of a community organization's efforts to mobilize concerned citizens in the wake of this huge environmental disaster that I figured I'd put in my two sense and try to spread the word a bit too. After all, time is of the essence.
For those of us watching from far away, it seems to come down to a matter of who to trust (no reference intended)--the big corporate bay polluters, the government agencies, or the little guy who's out there in the gulf, incapacitated despite finding what might very possibly be an excellent solution to at least part of the problem.
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