http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-florida-oil-spill-state-waters-20100507,0,1930576.story
Orlando Sentinel
Cannon, Haridopolos and drilling in Florida waters: Never say never
A chunk of tar sits on a beach Saturday on Dauphin Island, Ala. Tar balls have been sighted on the island after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. (PATRICK SEMANSKY FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / May 8, 2010)
By Kevin Spear, Orlando Sentinel
6:26 p.m. EDT, May 8, 2010
PENSACOLA – State Rep. Dean Cannon of Winter Park spent part of the fall, winter and early spring steering a public inquiry into the profits and perils of offshore drilling.
Last week, he took off in a small plane on a different kind of fact-finding mission, piloting himself and state Sen. Mike Haridopolos of Merritt Island over the graveyard of the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon and the enormous carpet of crude oil now drifting across the Gulf of Mexico.
With such a vivid view of the disaster, did the two Republicans in line to lead the state Legislature next year respond like many Floridians – especially those in the Pensacola area – with disgust and rage toward the oil industry? No.
Will the two Central Floridians renew their efforts to lift a ban on exploring for oil and natural gas in the thin strip of state-controlled waters within 10 miles of Florida’s coast? Maybe.
“We are not going to rush to judgment,” Haridopolos said Thursday evening during a refueling stop in Destin after the flyover of the disaster area.
“I think Dean has done a masterful job in the House getting all the facts. Remember, a week before this incident happened, he tabled the bill [to lift the ban], saying, ‘Hey, let’s wait and find out more information,’ ” said Haridopolos, the Senate’s president-designate.
“The Senate wanted to take more time on it, and now we can find out what happened and why it happened,” he added, “because we had been assured by all the experts, and for that matter history shows, that this had not happened in American waters since 1969.”
That was the year an offshore well had a major blowout near Santa Barbara, Calif., causing what many consider to have been the most environmentally damaging U.S. rig accident to date.
As evidence that modern offshore drilling has become much safer, the 40-year-old Haridopolos often points out that he hadn’t been born yet when the Santa Barbara spill occurred, and there hasn’t been an accident like it in U.S. waters since.
Just last month, a British expert assessing the potential for a disaster reported to Cannon’s state House committee: “Oil spills from offshore exploration, development, production and the transportation associated with these activities are unlikely to present a major risk to Florida.”
The two lawmakers now concede that a “game changer” occurred when the massive Deepwater Horizon, drilling off the Louisiana coast for BP PLC, exploded April 20 and sank two days later, killing 11 rig workers.
But exactly what changed about the game remains to be determined. Both Cannon and Haridopolos said that, because it’s not yet known what caused the rig to blow up and trigger an ongoing spill of an estimated 210,000 gallons a day, any decision about drilling in Florida waters would be premature.
“This is something we have permanently tabled until we have all the facts,” Haridopolos said. “It might take a year, it might take two years, it might take five years. It’s where the facts take us, and we are going to leave politics on the sidelines.”
Both lawmakers, up for re-election in November, have just two years left in office under state term limits. Haridopolos’ last term in the Senate would likely be cut to two years from the normal four because of the upcoming redrawing of districts based on the 2010 census.
With the Deepwater Horizon’s final well only partly completed and now badly damaged – and still gushing oil – there is no end in sight for the cleanup, let alone an investigation of the accident’s cause.
“Given the magnitude of this, I expect that it will take the remainder of my time in the Legislature, and it may go well beyond that,” said Cannon, 41, the House speaker-designate. “I don’t foresee that issue coming up anytime soon.”
Cannon said that during the pair’s flight over the spill, they were able to make out the 40-foot-tall, 100-ton, concrete-and-steel containment dome that was about to be lowered 5,000 feet to the seafloor in an attempt to capture the spewing oil and channel it to storage vessels on the Gulf’s surface.
Flying high enough to avoid restricted airspace, Cannon and Haridopolos also spotted one of the large airplanes in use as flying tankers as it sprayed chemical dispersant on the oil slick.
They described the heaviest concentration of oil in the center of the slick as showing up in orange, brown and reddish colors.
The spill’s edge was a mottled sheen, Cannon said, and had spread to within about 50 miles of Florida’s coast – comparable to the distance between the two lawmakers’ home cities in Orange and Brevard counties.
“I think the words Mike and I both used when we flew out and saw it were sobering and striking,’ ” Cannon said.
Just the threat of oil hitting Florida’s beaches has roiled the state’s tourism industry. But both legislators said they had confidence in the extensive and still-growing response to the spill.
Haridopolos noted that his Space Coast district has experienced enormous tragedy in recent decades with the loss of two U.S. space shuttles. The destruction of the shuttle Columbia in 2003 “took over a year to figure out what happened and to make sure it never happens again,” he said. “This probably falls into that same category.”
The two legislative leaders insisted that their decisions about drilling won’t be guided by polls, though Haridopolos twice emphasized that, before the Deepwater Horizon blowout, a majority of Floridians supported offshore drilling.
“I can’t stress enough that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Floridians felt, from the research that they had done and what they heard from the leadership of Dean Cannon, that it was a good idea,” he said.
Now, Floridians don’t appear to like the idea of drilling as much: A new Mason-Dixon poll released Friday found that 35 percent support offshore drilling, while 55 percent are opposed.
Kevin Spear can be reached at 407-420-5062 or kspear@orlandosentinel.com.
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http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-05-03/news/os-florida-oil-spill-tourism-20100503_1_oil-spill-crude-pensacola-beach
Orlando Sentinel: Florida tourism waits and worries
May 03, 2010|By Kevin Spear and Sara Clarke, Orlando Sentinel
PENSACOLA BEACH – The huge oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico remained well away from Florida’s Panhandle on Monday, but the region’s tourism-based economy already is taking a hit that many fear will be worse than Hurricane Ivan in 2004 or the recent global recession.
“We are used to disasters, but this is epic,” said Julian MacQueen, chief executive officer of Innisfree Hotels, which owns a Hilton in Pensacola Beach and three other hotels in the area. He figures that as many as 40 percent of his reservations will be canceled once authorities put Florida on notice that oil is expected to hit shore within three days.
“March and April were the best months we have had since Hurricane Ivan,” said MacQueen, who is overseeing development of a $60 million Holiday Inn resort here. “We felt like the worst was over.”
A well that blew out April 20 while being drilled by BP PLC in 5,000 feet of water, killing 11 workers, continues to release about 210,000 gallons a day of crude oil into the Gulf about 40 southeast of the Mississippi River delta.
A light sheen of oil reached Louisiana’s wetlands during the weekend, and in Pensacola television stations now report the spill’s position and movement as if it were a hurricane. As of Monday night, the weather forecast for Tuesday was for wind from the north.
“That’s going to slow down the oil’s approach,” said Christian Garmin of WEAR-TV in Pensacola.
Florida authorities are investigating reports that some oil sheen already has drifted onto the state’s coastline. Gov. Charlie Crist on Monday extended a state emergency in the western Panhandle as far south as Sarasota County.
A commonly shared worry in Pensacola Beach is that the rusty-red sweet crude gushing from the damaged well will inevitably hit the area’s famous sugar-sand beaches.
That would mean the worst is yet to come – still, the damage already has begun, with out-of-state visitors making nervous calls to local hotels for a status report or to say they aren’t coming. Also worried are the owners of thousands of coastal condominiums who typically pay their mortgages with summer rental income.
But the threat of lost income doesn’t stop there.
“If there’s no beach and fishing, that’s at least 70 percent of my business,” said Dewayne Espy, 32, manager of the Waffle House in Gulf Breeze. Next door, Victor Wright, 39, general manager of Gulf Breeze Bait & Tackle, said the family-owned business has begun to feel the pinch.
Special thanks to Richard Charter