BP Deep-Water Well

* Having experience in science and engineering, I suspect that excessive specialization may account for the failure of BP to stop the tragic oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. Experts tend to be wedded to familiar materials and methods. Generalists are better at imagining a wide range of materials and methods.
* Judging from diagrams of the deep water BP well, it seems that there is an open cylindrical pipe in sections of greater diameter at greater depths, the pipe being unobstructed from the top of blowout preventer to the bottom, the geometry and material at the bottom being unclear from the diagram. Materials and methods so far discussed in the media to master the well have failed, are likely to fail or will be suboptimal. At this time, there is doubt that the well can be controlled at the top. When a successful solution is devised, one may ask why it wasn't the first solution tried.
* If the diagrams of the well that I have seen are accurate, then there is a simple solution for taming the gusher--simply drop long narrow lead rods in the top of the cylinder through the blowout preventer. I imagine them being about an inch in diameter and quite long, at least 20 feet long, so that they would fall readily through the upflowing oil (possibly tapered to a point on each end to minimize lifting action of upflowing oil). The soft lead rods would be placed in the well head by a robot-arm attachment that cradles the rod in a steel shell that can be opened once the cradle and rod are properly placed in the well head. These rods would accumulate, pack and stack at the bottom of the well, eventually imposing enough resistance to upflowing oil and slowing its flow enough that it can be easily harvested through one pipe from well head to the surface. Owing to their softness, the rods would deform each other to pack without stressing the steel casing of the well bore. Since the resistance is at the bottom, there would be no problem of escape through flaws in the casing.
* The connection of the riser pipe to the well head stump is a problem that can also be solved by use of a soft lead collar or bushing around the new riser where it engages the cut-off riser stump at the top of the blowout preventer. The new riser and its collar should be conical and fit inside the stump, not over or outside the stump and blowout preventer as the attempted capture domes have done.