BP is refusing to give Florida more money for advertising. The $25 million the company gave the state in June runs out this weekend.
Sunday, the commercials promoting Florida’s clean beaches will be pulled.
Governor Charlie Crist asked for 50 million dollars to run ads through the summer. Monday, BP sent him a refusal letter. In it BP questions the effectiveness of spending money promoting the entire state, and encourages area advertising. Governor Crist isn’t giving up. “We are responding to their letter, trying to force them to do the right thing. Like they say in their commercials, ‘do the right thing.’ Well the right thing would be to give us the opportunity to market our state.”
Visit Florida, the state’s tourism agency, is digging into its own pockets to get the Open For Business messages to travelers. But Visit Florida says it’s a 10 million dollar a week job… and the agency doesn’t have that kind of cash.
Chris Thompson is the CEO of Visit Florida, “We are just going to have to get creative.”
While BP is cutting off the cash flow to help promote Florida, the oil giant is cutting no corners in its own efforts to improve its tarnished image; full page newspaper ads, TV commercials, and internet marketing are costing the company millions.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com
Oil spill threat to South Florida almost over, top federal official says
Top expert in charge of cleanup says Tropical Storm Bonnie and other events have virtually ended threat to South Florida
By David Fleshler, Sun Sentinel
6:47 PM EDT, July 29, 2010
The top federal official on the BP oil spill said Thursday there's now very little chance any of the oil will reach South Florida.
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said at a news conference in New Orleans that recent events, including the arrival of remnants of Tropical Storm Bonnie, have sharply diminished the oil threat to South Florida. And if an attempt by BP to permanently plug the well succeeds, he said, that danger will end for good.
Since the April 20 blowout, the fear in South Florida was that oil would get caught in the loop current, an ocean waterway that runs from the Gulf of Mexico through the Florida Strait, providing a path by which oil could reach the Keys, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach.
But a persistent eddy at the northern end of the loop current had created what Allen called "a hydraulic barrier" between the oil and the current. A temporary cap has stopped the flow of oil from the ocean floor for the past two weeks, so that skimming vessels are now having trouble finding oil to clean up. And the storm last weekend drove the oil north, he said, away from the loop current.
"The chances that oil will become entrained in the loop current are very, very low and will go to zero as we continue to contain the leakage at the well with the cap and ultimately kill it," he said.
Some outside scientists aren't convinced, expressing concern about the persistence of submerged plumes of diluted oil, whose movement and potential impact are unknown. But tourism officials, who had resorted to live webcams and television ad campaigns to convince travelers South Florida beaches were clean, were elated.
"It's splendid news," said Andy Newman, spokesman for the Monroe County Tourism Development Council, which covers the Florida Keys. "I feel about 50 pounds lighter."
BP is preparing to permanently plug the blowout by pumping heavy mud into it from the top and bottom of the well. The procedure at the top of the well could begin as early as this weekend, Allen said.
Asked if a permanent plug would mean the threat to South Florida is over, he said, "Yes it will be."
With the good news coming out of the Gulf, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection announced Thursday that it would begin reducing its response.
"The capping of the well and progress toward permanent well-kill have reduced the threat of oil to Florida's shores and sensitive environments," the department's secretary, Michael W. Sole, said in a statement. "We will now begin the cautious and measured rightsizing of protective measures to help Florida's residents and communities start the road to recovery."
Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, expressed relief at the statement from Allen but said her agency had been forced to spend an enormous amount of time countering sensational reports in the national and local media about a disaster that never materialized.
"The media never quit, never let the speculation die," she said. "We had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of BP's money to deal with the what-ifs. Everything that we would normally do to build business for later in the year had to be redirected. It's been a very long 100 days."
Although oil may be hard to find on the surface, scientists are studying mysterious undersea clouds of oil at depths of 1,300 to 3,000 feet.
Frank Muller-Karger, biological oceanographer at the University of South Florida, who is studying the undersea oil, said not much is known about them.
"Even today we still don't have a good sense of where they're going," he said. "Hopefully, they're diluting fast and they're not spreading in a way that will affect the biology of the Gulf."
At their depth, he said, the concentrations of oil will move more slowly than oil at the surface, where wind drives ocean currents. Even if it does eventually move south toward the Florida Strait, he said, it won't be at the surface or in concentrations comparable to the slicks that had been visible in the Gulf.
"It may reach South Florida, but at some depth," he said
A key concern in South Florida has been the oil's potential impact on coral reefs, sensitive but biologically abundant ocean habitats that attract thousands of tourists for fishing, diving and snorkeling.
"I don't think it means South Florida is out of the woods with the cap, but it sure improves things," said Richard Dodge, director of the National Coral Reef Institute of Nova Southeastern University in an email. "However, there is a heck of a lot of floating (and especially submerged) oil out there. It will go someplace, and we are still at risk. I think the undersea plumes are so far a mystery. The hope is that they will dissipate and not pose a risk here."
Jackie Savitz, senior campaign director for the environmental group Oceana, said the diluted oil that remains — on the surface and under water — could constitute a major environmental threat even if it's not as obviously ugly as oil thick enough to coat birds.
"Marine life is still being exposed to toxic in the oil and dispersants in the Gulf and wherever that oil ends up going," she said. "There are still a lot of unknowns. As oil becomes more diluted, the big animals are less likely to be affected, but zooplankton and fish larvae are the most sensitive and the most likely to still be affected. Even when the oil is not visible in the water, if it's present in lower concentrations it still could be toxic to those animals."
David Fleshler can be reached at dfleshler@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4535.
Copyright © 2010, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Oil spill threat to South Florida almost over, top federal official says
Top expert in charge of cleanup says Tropical Storm Bonnie and other events have virtually ended threat to South Florida
By David Fleshler, Sun Sentinel
6:47 PM EDT, July 29, 2010
The top federal official on the BP oil spill said Thursday there's now very little chance any of the oil will reach South Florida.
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said at a news conference in New Orleans that recent events, including the arrival of remnants of Tropical Storm Bonnie, have sharply diminished the oil threat to South Florida. And if an attempt by BP to permanently plug the well succeeds, he said, that danger will end for good.
Since the April 20 blowout, the fear in South Florida was that oil would get caught in the loop current, an ocean waterway that runs from the Gulf of Mexico through the Florida Strait, providing a path by which oil could reach the Keys, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach.
But a persistent eddy at the northern end of the loop current had created what Allen called "a hydraulic barrier" between the oil and the current. A temporary cap has stopped the flow of oil from the ocean floor for the past two weeks, so that skimming vessels are now having trouble finding oil to clean up. And the storm last weekend drove the oil north, he said, away from the loop current.
"The chances that oil will become entrained in the loop current are very, very low and will go to zero as we continue to contain the leakage at the well with the cap and ultimately kill it," he said.
Some outside scientists aren't convinced, expressing concern about the persistence of submerged plumes of diluted oil, whose movement and potential impact are unknown. But tourism officials, who had resorted to live webcams and television ad campaigns to convince travelers South Florida beaches were clean, were elated.
"It's splendid news," said Andy Newman, spokesman for the Monroe County Tourism Development Council, which covers the Florida Keys. "I feel about 50 pounds lighter."
BP is preparing to permanently plug the blowout by pumping heavy mud into it from the top and bottom of the well. The procedure at the top of the well could begin as early as this weekend, Allen said.
Asked if a permanent plug would mean the threat to South Florida is over, he said, "Yes it will be."
With the good news coming out of the Gulf, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection announced Thursday that it would begin reducing its response.
"The capping of the well and progress toward permanent well-kill have reduced the threat of oil to Florida's shores and sensitive environments," the department's secretary, Michael W. Sole, said in a statement. "We will now begin the cautious and measured rightsizing of protective measures to help Florida's residents and communities start the road to recovery."
Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, expressed relief at the statement from Allen but said her agency had been forced to spend an enormous amount of time countering sensational reports in the national and local media about a disaster that never materialized.
"The media never quit, never let the speculation die," she said. "We had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of BP's money to deal with the what-ifs. Everything that we would normally do to build business for later in the year had to be redirected. It's been a very long 100 days."
Although oil may be hard to find on the surface, scientists are studying mysterious undersea clouds of oil at depths of 1,300 to 3,000 feet.
Frank Muller-Karger, biological oceanographer at the University of South Florida, who is studying the undersea oil, said not much is known about them.
"Even today we still don't have a good sense of where they're going," he said. "Hopefully, they're diluting fast and they're not spreading in a way that will affect the biology of the Gulf."
At their depth, he said, the concentrations of oil will move more slowly than oil at the surface, where wind drives ocean currents. Even if it does eventually move south toward the Florida Strait, he said, it won't be at the surface or in concentrations comparable to the slicks that had been visible in the Gulf.
"It may reach South Florida, but at some depth," he said
A key concern in South Florida has been the oil's potential impact on coral reefs, sensitive but biologically abundant ocean habitats that attract thousands of tourists for fishing, diving and snorkeling.
"I don't think it means South Florida is out of the woods with the cap, but it sure improves things," said Richard Dodge, director of the National Coral Reef Institute of Nova Southeastern University in an email. "However, there is a heck of a lot of floating (and especially submerged) oil out there. It will go someplace, and we are still at risk. I think the undersea plumes are so far a mystery. The hope is that they will dissipate and not pose a risk here."
Jackie Savitz, senior campaign director for the environmental group Oceana, said the diluted oil that remains — on the surface and under water — could constitute a major environmental threat even if it's not as obviously ugly as oil thick enough to coat birds.
"Marine life is still being exposed to toxic in the oil and dispersants in the Gulf and wherever that oil ends up going," she said. "There are still a lot of unknowns. As oil becomes more diluted, the big animals are less likely to be affected, but zooplankton and fish larvae are the most sensitive and the most likely to still be affected. Even when the oil is not visible in the water, if it's present in lower concentrations it still could be toxic to those animals."
David Fleshler can be reached at dfleshler@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4535.
Copyright © 2010, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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