A tar ball just west of Pensacola, Fla.Photo courtesy NWFblogs via FlickrNEW ORLEANS, La. — BP resumed full siphoning operations from the ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well Thursday, but Florida was forced to close down popular tourist beaches at the height of the summer season as more crude washed ashore.
The vast slick has already soiled the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, but could spell disaster for Florida, one of the world’s top tourist destinations with more than 80 million visitors a year.
The state’s 1,260 miles of western coastline is home to scores of popular beaches as well as pristine coral reefs and an important fishing industry.
“There’s oil both in the water and in the sand,” said Warren Bielenberg, an official with the Gulf Islands National Seashore, one of the areas in northwestern Florida affected by the spill.
A swimming ban runs from far western Florida to the east side of Pensacola Beach through Santa Rosa Island, one of the region’s most popular tourist attractions, Bielenberg said.
State officials have mounted an aggressive beach and coastline cleanup effort to stop the oil from reaching Florida beaches.
At a time of high unemployment in other sectors, tourism in Florida generates more than a million jobs; in 2008, tourism brought the state $65 billion in revenue.
Oil-siphoning operations, however, resumed around 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, some 11 hours after BP removed the containment cap over the gushing well after a remotely operated submarine robots bumped into the device. The accident shut down a vent, forcing gas up into part of the system.
The device traps spewing crude and siphons it up to two surface vessels, the Discovery Enterprise and the Q4000. The system had been capturing some 25,000 barrels of leaking oil a day, but capacity was cut for the 24 hours between midnight Tuesday and midnight Wednesday, officials overseeing the spill response said.
The setbacks were bad news for Bob Dudley, who replaced gaffe-prone CEO Tony Hayward as BP’s spill-response coordinator on Wednesday. Dudley is an American who spent much of his childhood in Mississippi, one of the four states currently threatened by the catastrophe.
His first day on the job was further marred by the news that two people involved in spill cleanup efforts were reported dead in separate incidents.
One was killed in what was described as a swimming pool accident, while the other, reportedly a disenchanted boat skipper, was a likely suicide, an Alabama coroner said.
The overall amount of crude gushing from the damaged well is still unclear, with the latest government estimates ranging from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day. The spilling crude has so far contaminated more than 125 miles of Louisiana coast, shutting down fishing operations and triggering long-term fears for the region’s already endangered wildlife.
