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A year after BP oil spill, Florida Panhandle residents say they are seeing signs of recovery, but cleanup crews are still exposing sticky tarballs on beaches. Buck Lee of Pensacola, executive director of the Santa Rosa Island Authority, says most are small, but they are still there.
Though much of the goop has been skimmed from the water and plucked from the sand, the region is still paying the price of one of the nation's most devastating oil spills.
Workers and mechanical sifting machines continue to remove unsightly tarball specks from the Panhandle's pristine beaches, many business owners are still fighting to recoup lost profits from BP and the future impact on the rest of the economy and environment may take years to truly learn.
For now, there's some positive news: Visitors are returning to the Panhandle beaches in record numbers and spending at hotels and storefronts that were hurting for cash last summer.
"What a year it's been," said Lee, who spent the last year in countless conference calls and meetings with BP and federal officials. "Its been terrible, but finally things are finally looking up."
Lee said that sales during the spring break season of March, April and May were up anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent compared to the same period in 2009.
"We knew once the beach was clean, and people knew the Gulf was safe, the people would come back, and they sure did," Lee said, noting that based on toll receipts, 10,000 more vehicles entered Pensacola Beach for the Memorial Day weekend than last year.
While Visit Florida, the state's tourism agency, has not pegged an exact dollar figure for losses related to the spill, last summer many Panhandle hotels and restaurants reporting seeing sales down by 50 percent in the peak summer months.
State scientists and university researchers test the waters each week for oil residue, but the situation is apparently not as bad as last year, when signs on beaches warned visitors not to go into the water.
Still, researchers say they've struggled having a baseline to compare their current findings, because so few studies have been conducted in the Gulf Coast in previous years.
"We know less about the Gulf of Mexico then we do about certain parts of the moon," said Richard Pierce, director of the Center for Ecotoxicology at Mote Marine Laboratory, a Sarasota-based research center.
"It could be another three years before we have some definitive answers about the environmental impacts," Pierce said. "What is ahead is a tremendous amount of research and monitoring."
BP has pledged $500 million toward sponsoring research projects throughout the Gulf Coast states of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
So far, some initial findings in Florida show fish with lesions and discolorations, and oil found buried six to 12 inches beneath the sand in many locations.
"The oil has been finely dispersed, but we don't know yet if it poses a hazard," Pierce said. "It has to be observed over time."
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