BP Oil Spill Hurts Alabama Gulf Coast Residents

BP Oil spill hurts the people, like me, who live and work at beach resorts along the Gulf Coast of Alabama. The biggest income time is the summer beach season and slam bang here comes the biggest environmental disaster in a decade or more right at our front door. This is NOT a pretty picture.

We hear they are collecting globs of oil at Fort Morgan and that is less than an hour drive away from the condos where I work. Where I grew up in New Jersey we spent a lot of time on the beaches, we called it going to the shore.

It was quite common to get tarry stuff on our feet from walking in the sand at the edge of the water. Nobody liked it but who were we to complain back then. Mom carried stuff in her beach bag to clean up our feet before we got back to the car anyhow. Looking back at it now, I have to wonder again where that gooey stuff came from. Nobody did fancy weather center news reports about the junk that washed ashore onto the beaches in New Jersey. Most of us knew it was garbage from boats or ships or maybe even from sewage plants that had messed up filters. O great. Back then nobody reported how high the bacteria counts were along the coastline. Since then we have all seen or heard about sections of the sea by New Jersey and New York are "dead" because of the amount of garbage junk there. The water is even a different color now. Mostly black.

From what it looks like now around here in Orange Beach, Alabama, you can't tell there is a humongous oil spill about to crash into our coastline. And we have already been shown the tragedies and travesties it has caused in Louisiana, thanks to overwhelming news coverage and Internet information highways. But it feels like it will be here tomorrow if they are finding oil globs less than an hour away. And it might be here before I finish writing this from home. It makes me sick to see those oil covered birds. It makes me sicker to think how many more are going to happen right in front of me very soon. There ain't no getting around it. That gunk is on its way.

Great, our Governor has started to complain that not enough effort went into protecting the primary Alabama tourist area - the Gulf Coast. Now I won't go into whose responsibility it might be to protect our beautiful sandy beaches but I do know the people who come to these condos are not happy campers right now. I hear about their worries all the time. They think they have a problem because it will wreck their vacation and so they tell me. What can I do? I listen. I also know it is not a vacation for me. It is my job. It is my income. It is how I pay my rent and so on and so forth. So if they decide not to return for their vacation where does my job go? How long does it last? Am I feeling any stress yet? And who is listening to me?

I cannot even find words to describe the intensity of my emotions right now. Anger. Frustration. Fear? Yes some fear too. I have never been so close to such an environmental disaster or any actually. Except maybe the dumb little things we might have done in our own yards and driveways when we spilled something like oil for the car or antifreeze for the radiator. This folks is major stuff and not just for vacation. This is for real and we are the people who carry the burden right up front every day. This will hurt my whole family - the professional photographers, the church people, the school kids and even the chiropractor!

Some of our owners have their condos listed online and they are "selling" free spaces if the beaches are closed during the holiday weekend coming up. That is good foresight for them. It is scary for me. Well, maybe if my job folds because of the lack of visitors at the condos here, maybe I will have time on my hands for something gruesome like cleaning oily birds. It is not time I am looking for. I need my job. I need my income. It is only a matter of time and not much of that is left here. I am shook up and so is my family. We are already losing sleep just thinking about it and getting too much news about it everywhere. It ain't easy being on the front lines. It ain't easy being brave. We survived Hurricane Ivan but how will we survive this? Who will pay my bills when this spill hits here?