The warm, white sand stretches for miles as clean and flat as a freshly laundered bed sheet. The turquoise sea is so clear that I can see silvery fish playing around my toes as I take a cooling paddle. If there is any more pristine resort in which to spend a summer holiday than Pensacola Beach, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I would like to find it. And yet, at a time of year when usually there is barely room to unfold a deckchair, the shore is eerily deserted Ask Pensacola’s fretfully quiet seafront traders why the tourists have all stayed away and they angrily recall one chaotic day back in late June. Then, hungry for dramatic TV footage to support Barack Obama’s announcement, that the BP - or, as he preferred, ‘British Petroleum’ - oil spill was ‘the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced’, news networks descended on their town. They quickly found what they were looking for: shocking images of Pensacola’s famously white beaches thickly-coated with sticky, black crude oil and apparently beyond salvation. (Daily Mail)Saturday, 7 August 2010
Disaster that never was: Why claims that BP created history's worst oil spill may be the most cynical spin campaign ever
The warm, white sand stretches for miles as clean and flat as a freshly laundered bed sheet. The turquoise sea is so clear that I can see silvery fish playing around my toes as I take a cooling paddle. If there is any more pristine resort in which to spend a summer holiday than Pensacola Beach, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I would like to find it. And yet, at a time of year when usually there is barely room to unfold a deckchair, the shore is eerily deserted Ask Pensacola’s fretfully quiet seafront traders why the tourists have all stayed away and they angrily recall one chaotic day back in late June. Then, hungry for dramatic TV footage to support Barack Obama’s announcement, that the BP - or, as he preferred, ‘British Petroleum’ - oil spill was ‘the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced’, news networks descended on their town. They quickly found what they were looking for: shocking images of Pensacola’s famously white beaches thickly-coated with sticky, black crude oil and apparently beyond salvation. (Daily Mail)