For weeks, the inhabitants of Florida’s northwest Panhandle got clung to some belief the BP oil spill damaging the shorelines of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama would certainly avoid their famous ivory-white beaches.
Until now, this had: in spite of a good intermittent spitting of tar balls and also the encroachment of a thin petro-sheen on the horizon, charitable winds and currents retained the true mess from washing on land and threatening the Panhandle’s fundamental summer time time – as well as Florida’s $60 billion tourism industry.
Nevertheless the Sunshine State’s fortune turned to muck this week when a mat of oil, weathered but nevertheless thicker than the usual sheen, began to blanket well-liked Pensacola Beach, forcing Florida’s 1st spill-related seaside closures.
Thursday evening, saucer-size crude patties and large oil puddles still pockmarked the fine sand up and down the shore. The location beaches reopened Friday morning after the filth has been effectively cleared, however the emotional as well as physical harm was done.
Simple anxiety about the spill had cut deeply into the area’s tourist bookings, 90% which tend to be made for summer months. The bumper-to-bumper traffic which this season normally clogs Pensacola Beach’s Via de Luna, a tourist Mecca, is uncharacteristically manageable. Nevertheless the harm to the tourist sector could be a whole lot worse – car parking at hotels and attraction sites still look half full. Charter boat operators and commercial fishermen are seeing their livelihoods utterly idled by the oil spewing 5,000 feet below the Gulf of Mexico’s surface more than 100 miles away off the Louisiana coast.
What’s promising is that this gunk that reached Pensacola now seems to have gone back out to sea. But while Florida Governor Charlie Crist was again on the beaches Friday morning, urging the National government and BP to deliver Florida with an increase of oil-skimmer vessels compared to 20 sent there until now.
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