Fishers desert Pensacola beaches
By Jorge Estevez
PENSACOLA (CBS4) — Fifty days into the oil spill crisis, NOAA has confirmed that underwater oil plumes are spreading as far as 142 miles from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Officials with President Barack Obama’s administration says the containment cap put over the spill is showing promise; now, officials are concerned about the economic impact of the spill. In Pensacola Beach, CBS4’s Jorge Estevez spoke with fishermen who fear that the threat of oil has wiped out their business. Though the sun shone bright Tuesday, the bay side of Pensacola Beach – known for some of the best fishing – was quiet. “We are getting crunched,” angler Rich Young told Estevez. “Nobody is buying any fish, going somewhere else.” The fishing community has been hit hard by the oil gushing from a spill 190 miles offshore. Empty skies would normally mean people pushing for spots. Instead, the piers and bay are empty. Rich says there’s so little work that he’s had to take a job at a local restaurant. “We come out here. We catch bay snapper, grouper, tarpon, Spanish Mackerel.” It is here right now. You see no fishing boats.” “If you are an astronaut, space is your life. I am fisherman and water is my life,” the fisherman pointed out. “It sucks. It really does.” But there is some good news. The Federal Government closed a lot of the federal waters to limit fishing; Tuesday, about 400 miles of that water was re-opened. The problem is that the oil spill plaguing the states along the Gulf of Mexico isn’t one slick — it’s many. “We’re no longer dealing with a large, monolithic spill,” Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Monday at a White House news conference. “We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds or thousands of patches of oil that are going a lot of different directions.”
