While a vast containment operation dumps gallons of chemical dispersant and lays miles of plastic boom to attack a massive spreading oil slick, some U.S. Gulf Coast residents are turning to more unlikely remedies -- hair and pantyhose.
Shoreline communities threatened by the oil spewing from a ruptured Gulf of Mexico undersea well have started a grassroots campaign to fabricate homemade booms from these mundane materials to help sponge up the tarry mess before it sloshes ashore.
One such drive is under way in Alabama where hair stylist Phil McCory, inspired by TV images of a sea otter soaked with crude, first seized on the idea of using human hair to contain oil slicks after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska's Prince William Sound.
