Non-victims try cleaning up on BP spill

Well, you just knew that $20 billion would bring out a fair share of interested parties. Some were seriously hurt by the disastrous Gulf spill, others merely grazed, and still others barely shaken - and they all want money. It's the barely shaken group that's the most shameless, as reported over the weekend by the NYT:

What if every business in Florida's $60 billion-a-year tourist trade stands up and demands compensation for what it would have earned this summer had the spill not happened? And what if hotels, restaurants, gas stations, miniature-golf courses, amusement parks, grocery stores, retailers, movie theaters and others want more than just those losses? What if they demand future lost revenue, too -- money that would have come to Florida next year, and the year after, but won't because people who spent their summer vacations in, say, South Carolina decided that they liked it enough to go back? None of this should be very hard to imagine -- because it's happening.

The number of Florida claims is outpacing those in Louisiana; even businesses in Miami and Key West are filing claims. Actually, claims have been filed in all 50 states, which seems like quite a lot considering that the spill just affected portions of two or three states. Does a restaurant owner in L.A. really deserve to be compensated for not being able to serve a Louisiana shrimp dish for a few weeks? BP CEO Bob Dudley is hardly a disinterested observer in all this, but he does point out, quite correctly, that the spill story was vastly overplayed and its significance overstated. From his speech today:

Over 87 days as the oil kept flowing into the ocean, it frequently felt as if we were the only story on the news, 24/7. I have seen figures that in some months fully 30% of the 24 hour news coverage was devoted to the incident. I recall registering two particularly vivid sensations from this period. First, an overwhelming public sense of frustration over the failure of efforts to stop the flow, visible in real-time on TV. And second, a great rush to judgment by a fair number of observers before the full facts could possibly be known, even from some in our industry. I watched graphic projections of oil swirling around the gulf, around Florida, across and around Bermuda to England - these appeared authoritative and inevitable. The public fear was everywhere.