BP Enlists Cartoon Character's Help in Stemming Ooze

Covington, La -- BP PLC says it has hired cartoon character Wile E. Coyote to head the team of engineers who are desperately trying to stop the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The environmental and economic expansion of the disaster continues to grow as efforts to thwart hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil gushing into the Gulf have repeatedly yielded nothing.

Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer in charge of the operation to plug the spill acknowledged widespread frustration at BP's failure to stop the gushing well more than a month into the disaster. Damage is now spreading through delicate Louisiana wetlands.

"After a 16-day stretch with no discernible results, someone yelled 'We might as well get Wile E. Coyote to fix this,' and the idea was planted," Suttles said on NBC's "Today" show.

Mr. Coyote, whose credentials as "the Red Adair of the Desert" (after the famed oil well firefighter) pushed him to the top of BP's list over Cal Tech and the Army Corps of Engineers, was an easy choice. "We are certain that Mr. Coyote's solution for stopping the deadly Deepwater spill will exceed or equal the results achieved so far," said British Petroleum U.S. representative Marshall Renfield. "He has a track record," Renfield added. Phone calls to Mr. Coyote's spokesman were unreturned.

BP's first order of business after the Coyote hire was to order team t-shirts reading Disasterus Interruptus. Early Monday, Coyote is expected to fire a rocket-powered cork from his own drone aircraft, plugging the well. Plan B involves a catheter tube placed into the spewing well hole, with a huge M107 high explosive artillery shell jammed into the catheter, to be mallet-detonated by Mr. Coyote.

Alternative solutions include the" STP" approach (filling quart cans of oil as it blows out of the well, also known as the Lucy Conveyer Belt Solution), a lap-band surgical procedure on the well bladder, and the insertion of Sarah Palin rhetoric to block the well forever, although the side effects would threaten the gulf's wildlife for generations.