In sensitive marshes on the Louisiana coast, oil thick as pancake batter suffocates grasses and traps pelicans. Blobs of tar the size of dimes or dinner plates dot the white sands of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. Little seems amiss in Mississippi except a shortage of tourists, but an oily sheen glides atop the sea west of Tampa.
The oil spill plaguing the states along the Gulf of Mexico isn't one slick — it's many.
"We're no longer dealing with a large, monolithic spill," Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Monday at a White House news conference. "We're dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil that are going a lot of different directions."
Officials reported that a containment cap over the BP gusher at the bottom of the Gulf was sucking up one-third to three-quarters of the oil — but also noted that its effects could linger for years.
And as the oil patches flirt with the coastline, slathering some spots and leaving others alone, residents who depend on tourism and fishing are wondering in the here and now how to head off the damage or salvage a season that's nearing its peak.
At the Salty Dog Surf Shop in Panama City Beach, near the eastern end of the spill area, manager Glen Thaxton hawked T-shirts, flip-flops and sunglasses with usual briskness Monday, even as officials there warned oil could appear on the sand within 72 hours.
"It could come to a screeching halt real quick," Thaxton said. "So we've been calling vendors and telling them don't ship anything else until further notice."
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