Some Industries Still Reeling
Tourists have flocked back to the beaches of Alabama, Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle, helped in part by an ad campaign paid for by BP.
Other coastal industries are still trying to come back.
In Bon Secour, Ala., fourth-generation oysterman Chris Nelson shows off his family's seafood processing plant, Bon Secour Fisheries. About a dozen shuckers are at work at stainless steel tables, slipping a knife into oyster shells to extract the meat.
"We call this our opening house," Nelson says. "A lot of people call this a shucking house."
Half the tables here are idle.
"Our business is still struggling here at Bon Secour Fisheries because of the lack of oyster production," Nelson says. "I place the blame for that on the oil spill."
Nelson is on the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission. He says one of the most productive public oyster reefs in the country — east of the Mississippi river off the Louisiana coast — is not producing like it should.
"That was maybe not coincidentally the closest place to where the spill was occurring, where the leak was," Nelson says. "That area still has not produced an appreciable number of oysters, and has not recruited any young oysters to speak of since the spill."
Nelson says it's not clear whether the reef was harmed by exposure to oil, or by the freshwater that was released in Louisiana in hopes of pushing it away. Either way, he says, it's a problem that needs resolving.
"The economy of this region has been damaged tremendously," Nelson says. "BP has done a lot to bring us back. But again the commitment by both the administration and by BP was to get us back better than we were before. I don't think we're better than we were before.