Hurricane Alex passed by the spill area to its southwest. The counter clockwise wind circulation drove some of the spill toward the north Florida coast, more or less toward Panama City which remains well clear of the slick. The beaches in Pensacola might be closed for a brief period while they’re cleaned up. But this is over 500 miles from southwest Florida…. Cuba is closer.
On the positive side, the winds also broke up the slick to some extent, pretty much as the people at NOAA had guessed early on (same link in“Oil Spill,” below) making it easier for the mess to be degraded by marine organisms.
A friend emailed me the other day to say that the beaches around Pensacola were a mess but those around Ft. Walton and Destin (45 miles to the east of Pensacola) were clear. But all those beaches are basically north and west of the oil slick and vulnerable to onshore winds, local currents, and tides which could bring oil to them. If you’re headed that way, check it out before you go.
Anyway, these beaches will probably not suffer lasting damage: when the oil stops coming in, the authorities will likely scoop it up and haul it away. Bays and estuaries where the stuff may settle out to the bottom are another story.
We’ve found an interactive map of the spill. If you go to it, note the Continental Shelf. The Gulf Loop Current tends to follow the shelf, moving in a southerly, then easterly direction around the peninsula. The edge of the shelf is 30 to 50 miles offshore. If oil shows up at all, this is about as close as we expect it to get to us in any quantity.
I don’t really put much faith in news reports of tar balls washing up. Tar balls have pretty much always washed up on beaches. Sometimes they have small shells in them and even barnacles from time to time and resemble asphalt. What would be significant is a large number of really sticky (fresh) ones washing up. Seeing two or three over a space of a hundred yards is no big deal unless they’re really big. Seeing hundreds of them is. We haven’t seen anything like that around here.
There is, at this point, no reason to worry about oil washing up on Florida’s west coast any time soon. Probably not ever from this event. Concerns still remain about the effect on the Gulf fishery but at least our beaches and estuaries down here look OK.
While I’m on the subject, I’m going to put in some thoughts about BP. First, I hope you’re not a shareholder because it is difficult to see how the dividend can be maintained when the bill comes due for the company’s incompetence. That being said, the current calls for a boycott of the BP gas stations is, to put it kindly, misplaced. The stations are owned by local, small businesses, not the corporation. But even if they were owned by the corporation and even if the boycott damaged it to the point of bankruptcy, who would then pay for the clean up? Not BP; they’d be broke. That leaves you and me and all the other taxpayers. Personally, I’d rather BP footed the bill. Every damned cent.
July 1, 2010
SW Florida