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Oil Spill Catastrophic to Local Tourism
The clear waters, warm sand and crowds of happy people may be a thing of the past as the oil from the Transocean Deepwater Horizon’s explosion continues to trickle its way closer to shorelines along Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Beaches once filled with familial, recreational activities will soon be filled with cleanup crews. With no clean and safe beaches to perch and relax, gift shops, hotels and local restaurants will begin to feel the economic impact. After all, no visitors equates to no business. For local economies along the shorelines, the economic downslide will leave a large enough impact even well after the slick waters are cleaned.
The tourism industry can typically generate billions of dollars annually, especially during the months between May and August when families take their vacations. With the current environmentally disastrous spill, families are less likely to take trips to the coast for fear of safety hazards. The economic slow down experienced by the businesses in the tourism industry have suffered a cut in over 26,000 jobs due to inability to generate their sales. Rental companies are experiencing massive cancellations left and right. Instead of their businesses generating from visits by families, majority of their recent commerce has been made from visits by locals and the curious—both contributing very little financially.
Recreational fisheries in Louisiana are already receiving customer phone calls canceling trips and reservations that were made months ago, possibly even a year ago. Hundreds of property owners in Louisiana have already expressed frustration with their loss of income due to less customers coming through the affected areas, and even those unaffected areas are contaminated by association. When vacationers think of an oil spill, images of oil-drenched birds and dark masses above water surface come to mind, but realistically neither one are yet apparent along the shorelines until recently. Dauphine Island, Alabama experienced masses of tar washing ashore, setting beachgoers into a state of frenzy.
Some gift shops scattered across the Gulf coastline have already felt the impact of the media coverage on the spill as businesses plummeted a drastic 70 percent compared to last May. Empty are the rental homes, hotels, beaches, restaurants, gift shops, and other local attractions that thrive off the tourist seasons. With less business coming through these major tourist attractions along the shoreline, business owners and employees are finding it difficult to pay their bills and make ends meat for their families.
Located in Alabama, Baldwin and Mobile Counties comprise approximately 35 percent of the state’s tourism industry. In Baldwin County alone, well over 40,000 jobs are in the tourism industry that grossed over $2 billion annually. That was in 2009. Flash forward to May 2010, thousands of the tourism industry employees are now out-of-work. The expenses matriculated by business owners continue to grow, while business continually drops. The economic damages seem as endless as the spill itself: Messy and economically catastrophic.
It has been over 20 years since the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident, but the loss in sales and vacationers were never fully recovered. Many fear that this spill can leave the same economic impact, if not worse. British Petroleum and its cleanup crew are prepared to remove the chemicals from the waters of the Gulf, but what financial recourses do local business owners and their employees have? At this point, taking legal actions to recover lost income may be the only thing to give business owners a sense of optimism.
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