PENSACOLA, FLA.—Jennifer Motyleski came to the beach even though she is a third-grade teacher and Friday was the last day of school. “I called in sick today,” she said, her 6-year-old daughter frolicking nearby, “because this is going to be the last time I’m going to be able to bring my kid here.”
Chris Yost came to the beach with a Canon camera around her neck even though she and her husband already had hundreds of beach photos. “We wanted to get down here,” she said, “and take one last one, I guess.”
Pensacola’s 10-day Fiesta of Five Flags celebration began Thursday. Few Pensacolans are in the mood to celebrate. As gooey brown tar clumps began Friday to sully the expanse of brilliant white sand that is this small Gulf of Mexico city’s chief economic engine, hangout spot, relaxation retreat and source of civic pride — “It’s our life; it’s everything,” said lifelong resident Shirley Cotita, 56 — visits by some people who have always lived here took on the melancholy quality of a final trip to a loved one’s deathbed.
Nobody in Pensacola yet knows, of course, how bad the local impact of the British Petroleum oil spill will be. Pensacola Beach remained open Friday; as of the late afternoon, the damage was limited to hundreds of clumps the size of coins and a lesser number that were larger. But the visual confirmation of the looming existential threat was enough to intensify the anger, frustration and deeply personal pain that have dominated minds here since the potential ramifications of the spill became clear.
“We’re devastated,” said Tina Matthews, 43. “This is our backyard. It’s like someone came in your backyard and destroyed it. And you can’t do anything about it.”
Said Joe Nettles, a 66-year-old Pensacola native who returned home after working for 37 years for Ford in Cleveland: “I’m just tore all up inside.”
The beaches of Pensacola and surrounding cities are not only special in the emotional opinions of the people who live near them. Stephen Leatherman, the director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Miami’s Florida International University who is better known for his widely discussed “Dr. Beach” annual beach rankings, says the 160 kilometres of beaches of the Florida Panhandle constitute the greatest strand of white sand on the planet.
“It’s pure quartz crystal,” said Leatherman, who believes he is the only person to have visited every beach in the United States. “There’s not any place in the world where you can find a stretch like that.”
He added: “We have to stop that oil at the shoreline before it gets to the dry sand. Because if it sinks down into the dry sand, it’s going to be a disaster for years. An environmental and an economic disaster.”
The rare sand is the resource underpinning a Pensacola economy that is unusually tourist-dependent even for tourist-dependent Florida. No local industry, according to a report on the website of the Pensacola News Journal, employs more people than the 17,000-plus who work in tourism; only the military generates more local economic output than tourism’s $960 million.
The mere possibility of damage to the beach has already hurt some of the tourism businesses that line Pensacola Beach and the adjacent street. For example, some 30 people have cancelled over the last month on Traci Land, rental manager at Pensacola Beach Properties, a 20-year-old company which rents out 70 condos for one-week periods.
Land did not want to harp on the negative when talking to a reporter. It was negative reporting, after all, that drove her customers away. And so the rental manager of a company with the words Pensacola Beach in its name gamely took to extolling the city’s other attractions.
“There’s still restaurants, there’s still the zoo, there’s still the Navy base . . .”
Florida officials faced what one researcher told the Journal was a Solomon’s choice in deciding where to deploy a limited amount of shoreline-protecting boom. Because beaches would be easier to clean up than sensitive wetlands, and because the protection would likely be more effective in calmer wetland-area waters, the state decided to leave beaches vulnerable despite their importance.
That explanation was unsatisfactory to Nathan Wheeler, bartender at the beachside restaurant The Dock.
“I don’t understand why we don’t have enough boom to do both,” he said. “I’m just shocked. The oil is here — it’s here. And I don’t see a single person out there from BP or the government trying to do anything about it.”
There were at least a few people intermittently attempting what looked like an organized preliminary cleanup; they would not say who they were working for. Mostly, the beach was populated, albeit less densely than usual, by the people who cherish it — people like Cotita, a military employee who said she wanted to mail some of the oil to President Barack Obama; like Courtney Reed, 17, who graduated from a local high school two days ago and said the closure of the beach would leave her with nothing much to do this summer; like Tina Matthews.
Matthews, as so many others in this recession-battered state, was laid off not long ago. She took a day off from her job hunt to spend a day at the beach with her daughters, one of whom she pulled out of school, and her parents.
As her family walked slowly along the water, she kept her eyes on the sand. Every so often, she bent to pick up a little tar clump and place it in the green sand sieve she had brought for another purpose.
“I started out looking for shells,” she said. “I just kept finding these.”
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