21-year-old PhD suggests choking the Gulf oil leak with tires

BP's engineers can't stop the gushing oil spill, but a young genius from Long Island says she found the solution in less time than it takes most people to finish a crossword puzzle.

Since the "top kill," "junk shot" and "top hat" techniques failed to end the environmental nightmare, Alia Sabur -- who started her engineering Ph.D. at age 14 -- is pushing for a more radical idea.

The Northport native, who started reading before she could walk and who at 18 broke a 300-year-old record to become the youngest-ever college professor, proposes surrounding a pipe with deflated automobile tires, inserting it into the leaking riser, and then inflating the wheels to form a seal.

She calls the plan the "seabed retread."

"It's not completely out there, considering that tires are used for everything and they're expected to withstand a lot," Sabur, 21, told The Post.

The idea came to her while watching television reports of the failed attempts to plug the hole last week, she said. And she had it all worked out in a just a few minutes, sketching it out on paper.

"I can't believe that at this point, with all our technology, that something like this can happen and devastate an entire area," she said. "Even at the smallest estimate, it's still a lot of oil."

Since BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, more than 40 million gallons of crude have spilled into the Gulf.

Sabur, who is finishing her doctorate in engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said it frustrated her that none of BP's solutions seemed to have any success.