Protecting the Beaches and Warding Off “Economic Topkill”

By David F. Carr, webmaster

The worst environmental impact of the oil spill on Florida may be over, but the economic impact on the state will remain until perceptions of the problem change, emissaries from Northwest Florida told the Economic Forum of Palm Beach County at its July meeting.

John L. Fiveash Jr., an attorney Lewis Longman & Walker P.A. who represents the City of Pensacola and the Port of Pensacola, and Taylor “Chips” Kirschenfeld, Senior Environmental Programs Manager for Escambia County, were joined by phone by Edward Overton, professor emeritus at the Louisiana State University School of Environmental Sciences. The event came on the 100th day after the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig operated by British Petroleum.

Read on for the full story and photos from the event.

Although the program was advertised as “The Oil Spill and South Florida,” the speakers said the environmental impact on the East Coast of Florida is so far nil, and likely to remain so. Despite fears that the Loop Current could suck oil around the tip of Florida, it now seems that most of the oil has dissipated and is being broken down by natural biological processes.

But even if this optimistic assessment proves true, Florida has win back mindshare with the tourists who have been staying away this year – particularly on the Gulf Coast, but to some extent statewide. Fiveash said he was reminded of the challenge when he picked up the copy of USA Today left outside the door of his hotel room and found a story about tourists avoiding South Florida beaches on the front page. He turned on the TV and saw a segment where a reporter was combing a Florida beach at night, using an ultraviolet light to try to detect traces of oil on the beach.

“It’s a problem. It may not be an actual problem for you down here, but it is a perception problem,” Fiveash said.

For the most part, Kirschenfeld said the crisis has been over for weeks. “There was only about a 10-day period, in late June, early July, when there was a noticeable impact on the beach,” he said. It showed up as an “oily mousse” as well as in the form of tar balls and tar patties and oil-covered birds. But it was limited enough that the county has since restored the beaches to “pristine condition,” he said.

Even before the oil arrived, the county set up an ambitious environmental testing program to establish a baseline, taking samples of the water, sediment, and oysters at 34 locations to establish a baseline for comparison with future samples. Except for that 10-day period when oil was washing ashore, there has been no detectable trace of contamination in the water, he says.

To create this program, Escambia County actually bucked the direction it was getting from the Unified Command for the disaster response, which wanted all water samples sent to a small lab in Texas with “tight ties to the oil industry,” Kirshenfeld said. “We thought that was kind of a conflict.”

The county decided it needed to conduct its testing independently, even though it might not be reimbursed, in order to assure itself and the public that the results would be scientifically sound, he said.

The environmental impact seems to be tapering off, even though the release of oil into the environment is estimated at more than 10 times that of the Exxon Valdez disaster. But in contrast with the Valdez spill in Alaska, this one occurred in the warm waters of the Gulf, where naturally occurring microbes are starting to break down more of the oil.

Professor Overton has been all over TV news, and even on the David Letterman Show, explaining this process. Because these microbes evolved to consume small “natural seeps” of oil, they were at first overwhelmed by the scope of this spill. But now that the well has been capped, they are starting to catch up – rapidly reproducing to consume the oily feast.

“They’re degrading the residual oil that’s left floating around, particularly the sheen, which is what is easy to visualize from an overflight,” Overton said. There is probably still a significant amount of oil floating just below the surface, but it, too will start to biodegrade.

How long that will take for the oil plumes that have been detected deeper beneath the surface, in colder water, is debatable, Overton said. “But I don’t think we will see more gobs of oil washing ashore.”

There is a potential downside to this natural environmental reaction, which is that rapidly reproducing bacteria could cause “dead zones” of depleted oxygen, killing all the fish in the area. But so far that effect has not been detected. The effect has been more severe on dolphins and sea turtles who died after surfacing to breath in a patch of oil, as well as on sea birds, Overton said. And although oysters will tend to accumulate toxins from oil in the water that will render them inedible, fish generally will not, he said.

While many of the latest developments are positive, Florida communities need to work harder to get the news out, Fiveash said. If communities on the East Coast of Florida are finding that tourists are staying away based on false impressions of the extent of the spill, they may even want to pay for their own water testing and publicize the results, he said.

Meanwhile, he worries about the “Economic Topkill” of the burden the spill is placing on top of local communities like his, coming on top of a mortgage crisis and falling tax revenues and state funding. As the state pursues its claims against BP, “one thing that concerns me is that if the state does make a large recovery, that money should not be consumed by the state for general purposes,” he said. “That recovery may not come for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years – but it could be very large, and we need to track those funds.”

David F. Carr is a writer, editor, web consultant, and columnist on technology for small to midsize businesses on Forbes.com. See www.carrcommunications.com and www.facebook.com/carrcomm

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