For the local surf community in Louisiana, conditions are grim, reports. At nearly three hundred miles wide and two hundred miles long, the BP oil spill that first began to escape from the pipes of the Deep Horizon 66 days ago has now washed up on beaches as far west as Raccoon Island, Louisiana and as far east as Panama City, Florida.
Mark Windham, a 45-year-old Louisiana surfer is not hopeful about any future surfing prospects. “I really don't know if in my lifetime I'll ever be able to surf a Gulf Coast beach ever again,” Windam said. “It's a pretty bad situation over here.”
Courtesy of
Randy Coffman, a 52-year-old who has surfed at Louisiana's Fourchon Beach for 37 years, agrees.
“Fourchon Beach is where I surf…or should I say used to surf. It all seems lost. Our beach is covered in oil and with so much of it out there it's far from being over. Something needs to be done and real soon. In the meantime, what am I supposed to do?”
Surfers have reported chemical burns, skin rashes and heavy irritation. But these aren't the only casualties along the beaches. “When we found this dolphin it was filled with oil,” a former BP contract worker told .”Oil was just pouring out of it. It was the saddest darn thing to look at.”
The oil spill, now estimated at 110 million gallons of released crude oil, is the largest oil spill in U.S history.
Above, check out footage of strange bubbling surf off Pensacola.
-Shauna Sweeney