US Features

Oil fear washes over popular tourist spots

By Frank Brandmaier Jun 17, 2010, 12:45 GMT

Clean up worker tie up bags of contaminated sand on Orange Beach, Alabama, USA, on 16 June 2010. Clean up officials have started sending crews out at night due to the extreme temperatures of the summer day. EPA/DAN ANDERSON

Dauphin Island, Alabama/Pensacola, Florida- It was to have been the summer of a lifetime for the children of Michelle Rolls- Thomas.

The beach of the smart vacation paradise of Alabama's Dauphin Island was, in early June, more beautiful and wider than she had ever seen it, the sand blinding white and powder fine.

It was hot, and the sky was an exaggerated, almost unreal, blue. But the ocean - the Gulf of Mexico water - was empty.

'I keep the kids out of the water,' said the photographer who grew up here, as she pulls the children close to her.

Moving methodically among the vacationers on the beach were clean- up workers with transparent plastic bags, looking for the next tar clump.

As the weeks have passed, the clumps have increased in number and size, but as late as Monday, some people were still swimming, despite advisories against entering the water. A tourist told the Mobile (Alabama) Press-Register newspaper that her family had turned back from the nearby Gulf Shores, Alabama, beach after smelling the oil.

The worst oil slick in US history now resides in the heart of one of the most popular US tourist destinations, an uninvited guest along the spectacular sand beaches of Alabama and Florida. To add insult to injury, the Gulf Islands National Seashore - a park that hops along islands off the coasts of Mississippi and Florida, offering unique natural habitat - has joined the casualty list.

If Louisiana and its intricate wetlands were the focus of concern in the first weeks after the April 20 explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig, worry has settled eastward to the high-rise hotel complexes and endless pastel-coloured vacation homes of Alabama and Florida, which leave little doubt that tourism is really big business here.

US President Barack Obama included the oil-damaged coast east of Louisiana in his visit on Monday, talking to hotel and shop operators and sampling some of the local, and as-of-yet unspoiled, seafood.

On Tuesday, US officials confirmed that the ruptured oil well could be leaking up to 60,000 barrels of crude oil a day, 12 times the amount originally estimated.

'For a lot of people the oil spill becomes a lot more realistic. There is a lot more anger towards BP officials,' said the news photographer Rolls-Thomas. She talked of a couple from South Carolina that wanted to vacation on Dauphin island in mid-June, but cancelled.

The tar clumps on Gulf Island vary in size, from that of a coin to that of a pancake. Huge motorized earth movers have worked to build up a sand barrier offshore to catch the oil slick. Thick white sausage-like booms float guard-like in the water beyond.

On neighbouring Petit Bois Island to the west, something that looked like chocolate mousse had arrived, noted Natalie Murphy, a lieutenant commander in the US Coast Guard, earlier this month.

Out of concern for Florida's giant tourist industry, which pulls in 60 billion dollars a year and employs about 1 million people, politicians hustled in crisis mode to rescue the sunshine state. Florida launched a 7-million-dollar advertising campaign to travellers to pull them into the tourist market of the north-west panhandle region.

Along the 260-kilometre stretch of coastline on the Gulf Islands National Seashore, oil is threatening the 'place of myriad riches,' as the park proclaims to be - home to rare Kemp's Ridley Turtles, armadillos, dolphins and opossums.

In Dauphin Island, a ferry ride and than an hour's drive from Florida's section of the national seashore, visitors are staying away.

'On a day like today, the beach would be packed,' Rolls-Thomas noted.

The Coast Guard's Natalie Murphy has official confidence that the fight against the oil, now in its eighth week, can be won with booms and skimmers and the siphoning device set up by BP to suck some of the oil from the wellhead and store it in tanks on the surface.

But then she adds, almost in a whisper: 'I come from here. It's very emotional for me.'