Gooey tar balls and sticky oil sheen washed ashore on a northwest Florida beach among vacationers and swimmers today in what appeared to be the first impact on the tourism-dependent state from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to Reuters. In a sign that the impact from the worst U.S. environmental disaster continued to widen, the oil debris came ashore on Pensacola Beach, part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore which advertises "the world's whitest beaches." Florida, the "Sunshine State" with a $60 billion-a-year tourism industry, has been bracing for the arrival of oil from the 46-day-old spill, which has already hit the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to the west. Beachgoers on Pensacola Beach, many of them children, were picking up tar blobs scattered along the sugar-white sands. The balls were rust-colored and ranged in size from a button to a table tennis ball. Grace Vondohlen had a sticky substance on her hands from picking up the tar balls. "It's pretty sad because we go here on vacation every summer, and now we won't be able to go any more. I just can't believe it, because it used to be all just white sand," she said. Buck Lee, director of the Santa Rosa Island Authority, said he could not be sure the oil came from the spill leaking from BP Plc's undersea Gulf of Mexico well off Louisiana "but I'm 90 percent certain that it is."
