The gulf syndrome: Spill is hammering business

Businesses in parts of Florida and throughout the Eastern seaboard that haven’t seen a drop of oil from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe are nonetheless trying to plug their own economic spills.

Two weeks ago, Tewelde Tadesse was waiting for the worst and hoping for the best. The worst arrived.

Tadesse, the owner of the only grocery store in Lafitte, Louisiana, south of New Orleans, said thick, brown oil has invaded the marshes surrounding his town. The customers of his Piggly Wiggly, many of them fishermen, are stranded as the fertile fishing grounds they work at this time of year have been placed off limits—a hammer blow to the nation’s second-largest fishery.

“We’re right in the mouth of it,” Tadesse said. “They can’t fish. They can’t do nothing. Right now, we are really under stress with this oil problem. We just don’t know which way to turn. We’re not thinking of any investment. It’s just been too much.”

In some ways, Tadesse says, the leaking oil is a worse disaster for his community than a hurricane. “In a hurricane you know what you got to do. But this one, it’s not clear cut,” he said. Those marshes now being choked by oil are the fertile breeding ground for a fishing industry that is second only to Alaska in size.

Tadesse and his neighbors are contending with the direct impact of a disaster that began with the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which killed 11 workers. The rig sank two days later, causing an oil gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico 40 miles south of Venice, Louisiana.

Officials are scrambling to clean up the mess, and stop the gusher. The latest effort to shut off the flow of oil, called a top kill, was moved from this weekend to mid-week and will essentially pump sludge, followed by cement into the leaking pipe, in theory clogging the oil flow.

But the spill is being felt far from the Louisiana coast. Countless businesses along the Gulf that rely on tourism or fishing have been affected, many of them in places where no oil has come anywhere near shore yet. The Louisiana commercial fishing industry alone has a $2.3 billion economic impact. The Florida sport-fishing industry, also affected, will take a $1.3 billion hit.

Read the full story in Portfolio.com.