State officials begin to fortify Panhandle's fragile bays

With oil still a county away, and a cloudless sky overhead, the beaches teemed with Father's Day visitors  Sunday as state officials began to fortify the delicate bays that surround this popular state park.

In St. Joe Bay to the west, coast guard vessels and state Fish and Wildlife officers laid 26,000 feet of the 131,000 feet of boom scheduled to be coiled along the tip of Cape San Blas to the shoreline along the bay, one of the fragile estuaries east of Panama City.

Gov. Charlie Crist and Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Mike Sole requested and received eight skimmers to start training crew, as part of a detailed plan to protect the five sensitive bays in the eastern Panhandle, said Shane Strum, Crist's chief of staff.

Sole also approved a request by Franklin County officials to set up a blockade of  barges and boom that would close East Pass in Apalachicola, home to the most fertile oyster beds in the gulf and the economic lifeblood of the region.

"We watched what's happened in Louisiana and how their marshes were impacted and what we've tried to do is lead forward -- get the assets and have the boom ready," Crist told the Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times. More here.

Crist and Sole spent Father's Day on the emerald-hued waters of the bay, inspecting the boom work and riding a skimmer boat as its crew practiced and trained for the job of flushing the oil.

At the shore, families dug for scallops and thanked the governor for opening scallop season early, Crist said.

Strum said that tar balls had arrived in Walton County west of here, but no sign of oil had yet arrived in the fragile bays.

Crist said this is the fourth consecutive weekend he has spent monitoring the state's response efforts and one of nearly a dozen trips to the region since the saga began two months ago.

(Photo: Crist inspecting boom hear St. Joe Bay, photo by Shane Strum.)

"I think it's working," Crist said of the preparation efforts. "Nothing is perfect. There's a huge amount of oil out there."

Crist spoke with patrons eating at the restaurant at the St. Joe Marina and met visitors from Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia.

"That was very encouraging to see," he said.

Comments

[How's that hands off "Free Market" working out for us now?]

I hope Florida's ecology fares better than Louisiana's. If only George Bush hadn't exempted BP from the legal requirement that they file a disaster plan for a possible spill from Deepwater Horizon, or that they have a disaster team in place, in the Gulf, ready to deploy immediately - maybe Louisiana's marshes could have been saved. Unfortunately, BP initially lied about the magnitude of the spill and assured everyone it was minor, thus causing further delay. In fact, from what I understand, BP was under contract to supply disaster relief in Prince William Sound when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, and they had fudged the plans and were unprepared in that case too. I guess we just don't seem to learn that we can't have the foxes watching the henhouse, and that government regulation and oversight is a very necessary thing when dealing with these irresponsible corporations who's only concern is profit.

[Saint Petersblog]

Why @charliecristfl now leads Florida Senate race.

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