Gulf Oil Spill Causes 13 More Florida Counties to be Added to Emergency Preparedness

As the Deepwater Horizon disaster spreads across the Gulf of Mexico, Governor Crist has expanded the state of emergency to cover several more of the beach counties on the west coast of Florida. The additional counties are:

Franklin, Wakulla, Jefferson, Taylor, Dixie, Levy, Citrus, Hernando, Pasco, Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee and Sarasota.

“Sooner or later, it’s going to hit our coast, and it may not just be the Panhandle, it could be a lot more of our coast, although I pray that doesn’t happen,” Crist told reporters after a Capitol ceremony honoring slain law enforcement officers. “It’s an enormous mess, it’s unbelievable the magnitude of this thing.”

It’s the fact that Deepwater has been unable to cap the well that thousands of barrels of oil continue to flow that has the everyone concerned. As Mike Sole of the Department of Environmental Protection Agency said "We still have an ongoing release of some 5,000 barrels of oil occurring just 50 miles off Louisiana. … It’s not like ‘We had a spill. We’re cleaning it up and it’ll be over.’"

The cost of such the cleanup will be astronomical, and BP Oil is responsible for picking up the entire tab.