Our Observation

The water in Pensacola beach looked a lot like your café latte on Sunday. Residents lined the beach, not to play, but to take a mental picture of what their sandy beach is supposed to look like. Because later this week, it’s going to take the first hit of oil. The entire summer could be ruined for many more people — namely the tourism and commercial fishing industries — when the oil reaches the Florida shore.

A well being drilled by BP PLC blew out April 20 and is continuing to release about 210,000 gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day. It’s going to be another six to eight days before it can be siphoned from the source — more than a mile underwater — using concrete-and-metal boxes, and pumped into a barge. That’s more than 4 million gallons of oil rushing into our ecosystem. Oil corralling gear has been made relatively useless by strong waves.

The oil slick hasn’t made it to land — yet. It was about 75 miles from the Panhandle on Monday. A north wind on Tuesday was expected to keep oil away from Florida until later this week. A sheen has made it to Louisiana’s wetlands, and Florida’s are next. Dead sea turtles, jelly fish and fish are already washing ashore.

It’s not just the environmental damage — our economy is going to take a big hit. Hardworking commercial fisherman and grocers are forced to just stand by as more than 6,000 square miles of federal fishing territory stands closed — for at least 10 days, but likely more. And tourists are likely to reschedule in a hurry their trips to our sunny state if oil covers our beaches.

Yes, BP has pledged to reimburse claims for property damage, personal injury and commercial losses, but the details of how — and when — it will be done haven’t been explored. It could take months to come to an agreement, and even more months for the money to start flowing. The board investigating the rig explosion that killed 11 people and caused the leak won’t have its first hearing for two weeks.

It doesn't take much to wreak havoc on our ecosystem, but now we get to see what overkill looks like. It's sticky, black, hard to clean up and it's bigger than a handful of states. Imagine the damage if the rig had exploded just a few miles from Florida. That could happen if lawmakers lift a moratorium that keeps rigs more than 125 miles off shore. In 2009, Florida House Speaker-designate Dean Cannon accelerated a proposal to do just that, at a time when gas prices were rocketing to eye-popping levels and voters were ready to make allowances — and even tourism big wigs were willing to compromise, to find more oil. Now that’s all changed.

Now the potential effects of a spill are literally hitting home, and voters — and lawmakers — are starting to hedge their bets against “Drill, baby, drill”. We can’t gamble with our $60 million tourism industry or with our environment. Gov. Charlie Crist changed his tune after simply flying over the sludgy water in the Gulf. It’s time the rest of the lawmakers do the same and think twice about pumping oil at our environment's and our economy's expense.