As Gulf Tourism Rebounds, BP Seeks to Lower Payments
It seems like old times here on the Gulf Coast. The Flora-Bama Lounge is hopping, there’s a two-hour wait for a table at the Original Oyster House, and the first complaints you hear among the charter boat operators are about the latest fishing limits — not oil slicks.
The numbers tell a similar story, with many tourism-related businesses having their best summer in years.
BP felt obliged to note this officially. Last Friday, in a court filing that included a detailed list of indicators of “the strength of the gulf economy,” BP argued that “there is no basis to assume that claimants, with very limited exceptions, will incur a future loss related to the spill.”
The response here: Hold on, it’s not that good.
Since the spill last year, messages from the coast have been somewhat mixed, with some businesses arguing that it is continuing to hurt the coast and that more assistance is needed, and others, often led by tourism officials, emphasizing the positive to entice visitors and consumers.
This is not necessarily contradictory, as the effects of the spill were infuriatingly uneven, and a business does not have to be empty to be hurting. But the summer of 2011, a strong one by a variety of measures, has made this balance harder to strike.