After the oil spill, will tourists return to gulf?

The benefit for Panama City Beach: a list of new e-mail addresses to seek more visitors to bolster the beach town's billion-dollar tourist economy.

The visit was one example of aggressive marketing from Gulf Coast destinations, featuring ads for billboards, print and online, all created to counteract last year's summer from hell.

When BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded April 20, killing 11 men and spilling 205 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, much of the holiday traffic stayed home.

“Last summer was just a zero,” said Ed Overton, a retired professor of environmental chemistry at Louisiana State University, who has studied the spill as part of LSU’s contract with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “That was horrible economic damage.”

This year? Things are looking up, said Dan Rowe, president and CEO of the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We are looking forward to 2011; it should be a good year for us.”

Spring break for college students is already under way. In the coming weeks families with children will begin heading to the Gulf Coast, in numbers that peak during June and July. Atlantans will travel to any of dozens of Gulf Coast retreats spread across a 600-mile crescent from Sanibel, Fla. to Gulfport, Miss.

While Rowe and others are optimistic about a rapid recovery from the oil spill, as recently as late last month a research team from the University of Georgia found thick patches of oil deep on the ocean floor. “There’s a lot of it out there” Samantha Joye told attendees at a science conference in Washington, according to The Associated Press, disputing BP’s claim that the oil would be gone by 2012.

Overton was less concerned. Bacteria and ocean water have degraded the oil until much of it is the consistency of road asphalt, he said. What’s left behind washes up on the beach as tar balls, which will continue for some time to come, creating an aesthetic rather than an environmental problem, he said.

“I don’t think there’s any evidence that there’s any detectable hydrocarbon elements in the water,” he said.

Ally Stewart, a part-time nursing student at Georgia State University, planned a driving trip to Alabama's Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, and she was sanguine about the prospects.

“I’m honestly not too concerned,” she said. “I probably should be more than I am.”

Some Gulf Coast residents are similarly disinclined to worry.

“I’m thinking that we are getting back to normal,” said Emily Lafleur of Mobile, who works for a Spring Hill law firm and was on Dauphine Island when the oil rig exploded. “We all live down here, this is home to us, we just go out and get over it," she said. "You just kind of sweep up and get on with life.”

Rob Canavan will be going back to the Florida Panhandle on March 20, with 70 or so Georgia Tech athletes, for a week of three-a-day rowing practices in the Panama City Beach lagoons.

Canavan, the rowing coach at Tech since 1994, said he visited the beach over Christmas break. He was concerned that any petroleum residue trapped in the lagoons could harm the high-tech hulls of his shells, which cost $37,000 each.

He was reassured, seeing no evidence of oil and sand "as white as can be."

Said Canavan: "I had my feet in the water. It seems to be OK."

Spring break safety tips

College students go on spring break in search of fun but sometimes come home with sunburn, illness or worse.

In an attempt to keep spring break from becoming spring broken, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests the following guidelines for young people hitting the beach: