Governor Declares State Of Emergency In Escambia, Santa Rosa

April 30, 2010

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has declared a state of emergency in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties due to mounting concerns about an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The order activates the Florida National Guard, imposes price gouging rules, starts the flow of emergency money and waives highway weight limits. The order also allows state and federal agencies to coordinate their response and allows Florida to join the efforts of other states in their emergency response.

The Gulf oil spill is several hundred square miles in area, and continues to grow. It is moving in a generally northerly direction, toward the northern Gulf Coast. Some of the oil has already started to come ashore in Louisiana.

“Efforts to contain the crude oil leaking from the well have been unsuccessful,” Crist said in the emergency declaration. “Oil continues to sill from the well as all efforts to stop the discharge have failed and may not succeed for an extended period of time.”

The governor’s order includes the coastal counties from Escambia to Gulf due to the Deepwater Horizon incident.

Comments

15 Responses to “Governor Declares State Of Emergency In Escambia, Santa Rosa”

  1. eab on May 3rd, 2010 1:35 pm

    Chumuckla…I’ll explain it slowly.

    My.Post. Was. Meant.To.Be. Satirical.

    Sorry about that last word. I was trying to hold it to words of one syllable.

    Assume that.

  2. Chumuckla proud on May 2nd, 2010 12:04 pm

    Eab. No one is thinking that the right wing has anything to do with this accident. You know what they say about he who assumes.

  3. anydaynow on May 1st, 2010 8:00 pm

    There have been 39 previous blow outs in the Gulf…

    snip
    Robert Wiygul, an Ocean Springs, Miss.-based environmental lawyer and board member for the Gulf Restoration Network, said he doesn’t see anything in the document that suggests BP addressed the kind of technology needed to control a spill at that depth of water.

    “The point is, if you’re going to be drilling in 5,000 feet of water for oil, you should have the ability to control what you’re doing,” he said.

    Although the cause of the explosion was under investigation, many of the more than two dozen lawsuits filed in the wake of the explosion claim it was caused when workers for oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. improperly capped the well — a process known as cementing. Halliburton denied it.

    According to a 2007 study by the federal Minerals Management Service, which examined the 39 rig blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico between 1992 and 2006, cementing was a contributing factor in 18 of the incidents. In all the cases, gas seepage occurred during or after cementing of the well casing, the MMS said.

    While the amount of oil in the gulf already threatened to make it the worst U.S. oil disaster since the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, one expert emphasized that it was impossible to know just how much oil had already escaped and that it could be much more than what BP and the Coast Guard have said.
    snip

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100501/ap_on_bi_ge/us_louisiana_oil_rig_explosion

  4. eab on May 1st, 2010 6:59 pm

    If all you conspiracy theorists think the right wing conservatives did something regarding this tragedy just to make Obama look bad, well shame on you!

    Yeah,I just bet y’all do have your theories.

  5. Springfever on April 30th, 2010 11:26 pm

    The cost of this far reaching disaster will be impossible to put a pricetag on.

  6. radio free amerika on April 30th, 2010 10:16 pm

    HOW CONVENIENT!!!…rham emanuel couldn*t have wrote a better script on taking advantage of this “crisis”…now crist has a tragedy to play politics with…and he*ll get all the publicity that the main stream news media can possibly give him.

  7. EMD on April 30th, 2010 9:51 pm

    Chumuckla proud

    I smell it too. They have many safety measures out there. I do not think it was an accident. I cannot know, but if I had to choose between accident/not an accident, I’d vote the latter choice.

  8. jj on April 30th, 2010 9:43 pm

    It would be nice if all of the surrounding churches would have Special Prayer for the victims families of the oil platform disaster and also, for the effects of the spill. This could involve our economy in this area for years to come.

  9. Carolyn Wallace on April 30th, 2010 8:05 pm

    Did anyone spot President Obama on the oil rig with a match and a stick of dynamite? I think not.

  10. anydaynow on April 30th, 2010 7:42 pm

    I wish there had been some concern about price gouging at the pump before this disaster occured. Gas prices are 25-30 cents a gallon higher in the panhandle than in all the eastern states. It seems to me that if New Jersey can sell gas for $2.51 a gallon Florida can too.

    Here are some sites related to the oil spill

    EPA- focuses on environmental and human health concerns
    http://www.epa.gov/bpspill/

    NOAA-focuses on natural resource, habitat, and fisheries
    http://response.restoration.noaa.gov

    Coast Guard-focus on details of the response effort
    http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/

  11. Frank on April 30th, 2010 7:01 pm

    “You take GOD out, deaster moves in”. Why do we pray to GOD when things like this happen? We need him all the time not just when things happen that we don’t understand. You can thank OBOMA you voted him in.

  12. Chumuckla proud on April 30th, 2010 5:42 pm

    I guess I am the paranoid one here…I am smelling something rotten and it ain’t the dead fish on the coast. I think the US deserves a very in depth investigation of this “explosion/so-called accident” by the most highly regarded professionals and to keep the politicians out of it. I have my own theories.

    I also think that only the true professionals should be allowed to make the decisions on how to clean up this mess…not the politicians.

    Do you think the US will be reimbursed by BP for the grunt work our Coastguard and Navy is doing for them right now? I think this will boil down to yet another burden on the US taxpayers.

  13. huh on April 30th, 2010 5:12 pm

    Agreed JR ,

    Apparently these things aren’t as safe as we all thought they were, I think most of us never assumed something like this would happen.

    But it is going to be devastating to the gulf, the tourism, and more than that, the fishing industry .

    People are going to be out of work , no one will want to go to the beach if they can’t eat seafood and swim in clean waters

  14. J.R. Ewing on April 30th, 2010 4:03 pm

    I beleive the tree huggers predicted something like this could happen….

    Say goodbye to the Emerald Coast, and the Worlds whitest beaches…maybe not forever, but for a very very long time.

    Take away the beaches….and the Gulf, and honestly pensacola’s allure as a tourism destination is about gone.

    J.R. Ewing

  15. huh on April 30th, 2010 2:05 pm

    Drill baby drill! , actually they should be out on the beach with mops and buckets