By Gina Jordan
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wfsu/local-wfsu-916018.mp3
Tallahassee, FL – While some tar balls are still washing ashore in Northwest Florida, the giant slick created by BP's Deepwater Horizon explosion has greatly diminished. That's what the Florida Cabinet was told during an update on the oil spill Thursday. Gina Jordan has more on the outlook for the state.
The Cabinet heard about the condition of the damaged well, the testing of Gulf seafood, and how Panhandle banks are doing. Commissioner Thomas Cardwell with the Office of Financial Regulation recently met with bankers and federal regulators in Pensacola. They told him the banks in the region had been dealing with the recession for about three years, with construction and tourism taking a dive.
"Around the first of this year, the bankers believed that they saw the start of what was a turnaround or certainly at least the end of a decline."
Customers were starting to make transactions, investment bankers were taking their calls, and buyers were starting to make acceptable offers on bank-owned real estate. Then came the oil spill, and the activity again ground to a halt.
"This all occurred before the first tar ball hit the beach. What happened was that the uncertainty that the oil spill created essentially broke the confidence that had been slowly building up over some period of time. Some of the bankers described it like having a hurricane hanging off your coast for a number of days and nobody really just knowing what to do or what the effect was ultimately going to be."
The timing was particularly bad, the bankers told Cardwell, because sixty-percent of the tourism-related revenue in Northwest Florida is made in the three months between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Now that the leak has been capped, Cardwell says that has relieved what he called paralyzing uncertainty for the banks. BP is paying claims, and the government has responded in the form of low interest loans. While the situation is still being played out, he says things are moving in a positive direction.
"We want to make sure we're not caught up in some of the doomsday scenarios that you see the media putting out about what's happening to Florida."
Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, also a member of the Cabinet, says the disaster has been made worse by bad information in the media, which in some cases has put the Florida fishing industry in a near panic.
"If we keep saying every night this is day 101 and it's the biggest disaster that mankind has ever seen; we know it was very bad, but they're not saying, oh by the way, the fish and the shellfish are fine in Florida, there's not a problem there. They're not saying that, and the confidence level of the consumers of this country is about an all time low on Gulf fish and seafood. Some restaurants are actually going to take the word gulf off of their menus."
Bronson recently sent letters to the Chief Executive Officer of BP, President Barack Obama, and congressional members about the need to test the seafood from the Gulf over the next decade. But so far, testing has shown that fish caught in the oil spill area have not retained those chemicals. He also noted that the oil is moving to the south and west, and is going deeper, leading to more Gulf waters being reopened for fishing; and the oil is breaking down quickly, thanks to Mother Nature.
"Until we get the confidence level of the consumer of this country back, these poor people over there in the fishing industry and the shellfish industry are going to be looking at a serious problem for a number of years unless this turns around, and maybe even put a lot of these restaurants, hotels, and the actual industry itself and everybody who's connected to the fishing and shellfish industry out of business."
It's been a couple of weeks ago since BP successfully capped the well with a temporary fix. Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Sole says two relief wells have been drilled, and a permanent capping of the leak could come in the next few days. The operation is called a static kill. Mud will be injected into the well, followed by cement.
"I will tell you as a result of this well being shut in for the last fourteen days, there is no use of dispersants, they're not burning, and the skimming amount that they're able to recover is actually quite small. They're actually having a difficult time finding skimmable volumes of product."
Sole says the oil is not expected to affect South Florida beaches, and the likely impact along the Gulf's Northwest shoreline has been greatly diminished. But tar balls are still coming ashore, so the cleanup efforts continue.