How Do You Advertise an Oily Beach?

Escambia County commissioners bickered and snarled and traded accusations last night. Then they "approved spending $700,000 in BP funds for tourism advertising to get the word out nationally about the oil spill's impact on the beaches."

Jamie Page has the story ["Oil spill: Commission OKs spending $700K in BP funds on tourism"]

The money is to produce television commercials on the current state of local shores. The ads are to run in Pensacola's major metro feeder markets, such as Atlanta, Birmingham and New Orleans.

The real tourist entertainment was inside the commissioners' meeting.

On Monday, Commission Chairman Grover Robinson IV complained: "This ad campaign should have gone out last week and that money should have been spent. But now it has to have board approval because one member is creating a stink. It's crazy."

On Thursday, before the commission vote, Valentino lashed out at Robinson for putting the blame on him.

And so forth. The oil offshore has everyone on edge and looking for someone else to blame.

It's BP's fault, people! They had a plan to save walruses and sea lions, not the people and sea life of the Gulf Coast.

Seven hundred grand is a lot to throw away on Atlanta television stations, with Pensacola ad agencies taking their usual cut. We have to wonder if all that cash wouldn't be better spent by divvying it up among the beach businesses; particularly if it turns out the ads will be airing just as the oil inundates local beaches.

How do you advertise an oily beach? Bearing in mind the serious advice from the very un-serious "BPGlobal PR", what can you say?

"It isn't as bad as Louisiana?"
"Not as dumb as Mississippi?"
"BP tries to clean our beaches whenever it feels like it?"

Word has it the state of Florida is embarking on an ad campaign whose essential theme is, "Florida Beaches: Come see for yourself." That might attract coastal morphologists, biologists, and others in the scientific community. But they're already here, seeing for themselves.

What other kinds of tourists can we target?

• For beach weddings: "Our ministers bathe with soap regularly!"
  
• Families with children on limited vacation time: "For a great time, visit our beaches at low tide!"
• Reckless young people looking for a high time: "Tarballs: Mother Nature's answer to every addiction."

Who else? How about TV ads aimed at all of those "drill, baby, drill" delegates at the '08 Republican Convention? "Florida Beaches: Come get what you asked for."

Here's a hot promotional idea that will appeal to them: oil and violence!

Loathsome Landfall Likely: Thursday June 3 BP Oil Update

What would-be tourists in their right mind are likely to pack up and head for the "clean, clear" water of Pensacola Beach ... when the forecast comes from something called "DisasterResponse.com?"

1. Pensacola Area.

As of mid-morning, the oil slick widely reported to be just a few miles offshore still was not visible from Pensacola Beach. Orange booms are at the ready along shorelines but not yet stretched across vulnerable sea lanes such as Pensacola Pass and the narrow entrance to Little Sabine Bay. Both are still open for boat traffic.

Occasional brief but intense rain storms this morning came from the southwest. Consistent with that, all local media are reporting that winds and water currents will be unfavorable over the next three days, very likely pushing BP's oil from the south and west onto local beaches and into bayous and estuaries connected with Gulf waters.

"Several areas of sheen were spotted as close as 7 1/2 miles from Pensacola Pass on Tuesday," the Pensacola News Journal report. Later this morning, it also updated that news with this: "Oil sheen was reported by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission approximately six miles from Navarre Pier in Santa Rosa County today."

The PNJ adds:

Any potential impacts to Florida’s shoreline will be highly weathered, in the form of tar balls, oil sheen, tar mats or mousse – a pudding-like oil/water mixture that could be brown, rust or orange in color.

To see an animated graphic of the expected winds through the weekend, click here for the Windmapper.

Or, you could simply reason out our dim prospects from the sudden appearance of national media. That's a sure sign things are about to get visually much worse.

If anyone feeds off delicious disaster pictures, it's the Tee-Vee pod people. You will know them by their perfectly coiffed hair and the crocodile tears in their eyes.

2. What Lies Beneath.

Using huge shears rather than the diamond-edged saw blade that got stuck in the well riser yesterday, BP managed to sever the riser pipe this morning. The New York Times explains:

Delicately manipulating a 20-foot-long shear at depths of nearly a mile, technicians successfully snipped a key riser pipe in their effort to contain the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. They prepared to cap the remaining pipe later in the day with a dome that they hoped would allow them to funnel the oil to tankers on the surface.

Adm. Thad W. Allen, who is commanding the federal response to a spill that has been called the nation’s worst environmental disaster, told a news conference in Metairie, La. that the cut was “ a significant step forward.” But he cautioned that using as shear, rather than a finer diamond-laced wire saw, as the slicing instrument resulted in a jagged cut that will mean the containment cap will fit less snugly.

As a consequence, there is an increased risk "that oil may escape and that the cap itself could become filled with hydrates, ice-like crystals of gas and water that form at low temperatures and high pressures."

3. Surface Surfactants.

With this latest setback, it seems inevitable we will be living with the recurrent fear of new oil invasions on Pensacola Beach for months ahead. When, how thoroughly, and how often the beach will need to be cleaned is as yet undetermined. It's entirely possible it will become at least a daily event.

Hotels may be stocking up right now on Tarroff Towelettes for their guest rooms. But that could be an overly optimistic move. Will there be any tourists left who could use them? Not that many, we fear.

4. Disaster Response: 'C'mon In, the Water's Fine!'

The oil catastrophe has put local businesses and government agencies in a pickle. If they tell the truth, who would want to waste precious family vacation time and money playing dodge-the-tarballs on our beaches? On the other hand, if they don't tell the whole truth they risk alienating forever all those who rely on a too-optimistic description of current conditions.

The dilemma is illustrated all too well by an "alert" we received in our email box this morning from the Escambia County Disaster Response team:

The message is true enough, as far as it goes at this hour -- and maybe the next. But what would-be tourists in their right mind are likely to pack up and head for the "clean, clear" water of Pensacola Beach or Perdido Key when the forecast comes from something called "DisasterResponse.com"?

The dilemma is reminiscent of one we encountered twenty-five years ago. At the time we were living far away from the Gulf Coast. Our dear mother (now deceased) was living out her final years in Ft. Walton Beach. We would fly down to visit her regularly, and thus became acquainted with the only local newspaper in town at that time.

It was known as the Playground Daily News. It was an absolutely awful newspaper, printed on the cheap so badly that the black ink came off in your hands as you turned the pages. Some locals we came to know actually acquired the habit of donning gloves before they would sit down and touch the newspaper.

Typically, each issue was six or eight pages long. Advertisements made up more than half the copy. As for actual news, most of it consisted of engagement announcements, marriages, hospital admissions, civic and social club awards, and the like. The rest of the "news" was almost always happy, happy, happy stuff.

There were, as we recall, surprisingly few obituaries and none whatsoever about the occasional drowning. An entire county full of people could have sunk out of sight in the waters off Ft. Walton Beach and the Playground Daily News would not have had room to mention it.

In winter, we often encountered Canadian tourists at the local convenience store where we went to seek out a real, imported, newspaper. We noticed the Canadians always bought the local paper; many almost immediately would turn to page two, where the Playground Daily News printed the daily weather report. They would glance at the page, grunt with satisfaction, and, as we supposed, head off for their rented condo.

Invariably, the weather forecast as related by the Playground Daily News was "warm and sunny." It might be raining buckets outside, or even snowing, but inside the pages of that Ft. Walton Beach newspaper perfect beach weather was always in the offing.

One day, we finally asked a Canadian snowbird who had just purchased the paper if he hadn't noticed that the local weather report was pure hokum, ginned up (as we supposed) to keep tourists like him from heading farther south or going home.

"Of course," he said. "The wife and I don't even read it. We just mail it back home to make everyone there jealous." [Update below]

5. Cams, Cams, and More Cams.

For much of the early morning today, BP's spillcam was down and showing nothing. But BP Corp. has a number of others which it hasn't been especially eager to share with the public.

Through the magic of the Internet Tubes, however, they've been discovered on-line. And several are hard at work. For alternative robotic views of what's going on a mile below the Deepwater Horizon site, click here or here.

Dept. of Amplification
6-03 pm

Our neighboring blogger Bryan over at Why Now? makes the same point about honesty in tourism promotion. He's much more direct than we are.

"If you lie to people to bring them down to the coast," he says, "they’ll leave angry and won’t be back. But if you tell them the truth, they will believe you when you tell them it is alright to return."

Unless, that is, they're inclined to lie to their friends, like the Canadian we mentioned.

Smelly Gulf Breeze

We don't know if it's related to BP's river Great Lake of oil, due south by about 50 miles, but this afternoon the Pensacola suburban town of Gulf Breeze -- just off 3-Mile Bridge -- smelled horrible to us. BeachLover noticed it, too. She writes: "Essence of oil was the perfume of the day in Gulf Breeze proper mid-morning."

Actually, it smelled to us more like the Cayahoga River, circa 1969.

Sure enough, the Pensacola News Journal is reporting this afternoon that "A fuel-like odor throughout parts of Escambia County could be related to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico."

The Escambia County Emergency Operation Center received reports of the smell this afternoon. There is no measurement data for petroleum-like substances in the air, but officials have reported the smell to a BP hotline and the source is being investigated, according to an EOC press release.

We have to say this: BP can shovel all the money it wants into Florida "to support the [tourist] industry’s efforts to provide accurate information about the state of the beaches across the region.” But if the smell that assaulted us today persists over the coming weeks and months, it won't do a bit of good except, perhaps, to attract those few tourists who suffer from incurable anosmia.

Dept of Amplification
5-20 pm

Duncan Black reacts to Florida Senate candidate Kendrick Meek's 'demand' that BP give more money to Florida to be used for tourist advertising:

Now, in a world where people have the wrong idea that Florida is about to be covered in a glorious rainbow in chocolate sheen and are therefore not making travel plans there's a certain logic to this. However, in a world where Florida is actually about to be covered in a glorious rainbow in chocolate sheen I don't really think a tourism ad campaign is going to do the trick.

But Duncan forgets about all those tourists without working noses who are dying to visit Florida!

Pensacola Motto

In the persistent wake of the disturbing Pensacola "Quality of Life" survey, today Reginald Dogan rushes to the city's defense with a great slogan:

At least it's not Detroit.

Zoo Woes Mount

Off the island, one of the top local attractions for some years in the Florida panhandle has been the Zoo of Northwest Florida, located "down the highway" in Gulf Breeze. For a community the size of Greater Pensacola it's been a fun-to-visit educational facility with a surprisingly wide range of well-appointed animal exhibits, a still-impressive animal breeding program, and visitor-friendly attractions like the zoo train, concession stands, and picnic area.

Tourists enjoy it. Schools rely upon it for the most popular of their student field trips. Many resident families make at least one visit a year to the zoo.

It's especially impressive for those who remember what passed for a Gulf Breeze 'Zoo' decades ago. What we recall from the late '60s and '70s was a miserable, privately-owned Old Florida mom-and-pop roadside collection of piteous cages imprisoning a couple of flea-bitten bears, clinically depressed foxes and an alligator or two.

However dramatic the improvement in more recent times, it's obvious the Zoo of our time is once again a deeply, deeply troubled institution. As a number of local papers have been pointing out with the occasional news downer, it's been cursed with ineffectual management (now replaced and reorganized as a public charity), starved for funds, embarrassed by a few well-publicized animal deaths, and hit by new and more expensive state bonding regulations. Now, it's facing the double-whammy of declining attendance and rising costs. With the escalating gas crisis, things can only get worse.

The hurricanes of 2006-05 delivered what may turn out to have been the coup de grâce. Losing accreditation in 2006 from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums wasn't any help, either, although hope remains that accreditation can be regained rapidly if only the new charitable foundation that's now running things can secure a reliable source for the $3 million needed to pay off existing debt. The local fund drive over the past year energized zoo fans from 2 to 92, but in the end volunteers were able to raise only a third of what is needed.

Now, it seems, the 'new' new management has been taken by a con man. Or almost taken, to be more precise. Louis Cooper of the PNJ has the early dispatch:

A year’s worth of negotiations to bring a headline-making fund-raiser to The Zoo in August hit a brick wall Tuesday, with officials learning the proposal was a hoax.

Danyelle Lantz, executive director of The Zoo, was scheduled to host a news conference today flanked by stars and executives from Disney’s popular “High School Musical” movie series to announce a major fund-raising event aimed at raising $150,000 for the cash-strapped park.

Lantz said The Zoo had been working with “someone posing as a representative of Zac Efron, a member of the cast of Disney’s ‘High School Musicial,’ Drew Seeley, a performer associated with various Disney Channel albums and programs and Disney Corporation.”

But officials learned late Monday that was not the case.

It's humiliating, for sure, but hardly the biggest problem the Zoo faces. That's the fact that no local government, well-heeled charity, corporate giver, or wealthy locals with ample means have stepped up to take the Zoo off life support.

Try as we do, we can't banish the suspicion this might have something to do with the fact that the Zoo occupies over 50 acres of prime real estate along Highway 98. Here in the panhandle, whenever it's Developer versus Man, Developer wins. How much higher do you suppose are the odds when it's Developer versus Monkeys?

An Extravagance We Cannot Afford

If, as it has been observed, military generals are always preparing to fight the "last" war with outmoded technology and tactics that have been superceded by new conditions, can we say that those who govern Pensacola Beach now seem to be planning to fight for a type of tourist business that is rapidly disappearing with the changing times and economy?

Doubling the Bob Sikes Bridge toll to the equivalent of half a gallon of gas is not the problem. Building an $8 million to $10 million parking ramp in the center of Pensacola Beach is.

Beach businessman Bruce Ferris has it right when he told the News Journal's Kris Wernowsky, "The money could be utilized on a better shuttle system."

The best ECAT has been able to manage for access to Pensacola Beach is a miserably bare bones bus schedule that runs between the beach and downtown Pensacola only twice a day, six days a week. The scheduled times and stops are abysmal. You could move an artillery regiment faster -- and they'd probably have more fun while sight-seeing along the way.

Nothing but highways built for individual automobiles directly links Pensacola Beach to the airport; the I-10 corridor; East-West coastal highway 98; popular scenic, historic, museum, or recreational sites on the mainland; and all the other beach communities from Fort Walton to Perdido Key.

For once, how about meeting the future instead of lagging behind it? Rather than committing to build a multi-million parking lot as if we are still in the 1980s, the Santa Rosa Island Authority can lead the way in getting everyone together throughout the Greater Pensacola area; all the little fiefdoms from Perdido Key to Fort Walton Beach. Start planning now for an imaginative, convenient, and enjoyable area mass transit system that integrates and expands tourist (and local resident) travel options throughout the Northwest Florida coastal area.

Hundreds of other communities in the U.S. and around the world -- many of them with widely dispersed populations no bigger than ours -- are doing it with a mix of buses and trams, light rail cars, and a variety of other people-moving systems. You can be sure thousands more are planning to join them soon as we are compelled, at last, to wean ourselves from our oil addiction.

In four months, a $2 toll is going to look cheap when gas is selling for $7 a gallon. Only some "new" multi-million dollar parking ramp will seem like an extravagance that we cannot afford.