Sporting dark sunglasses, some sandals and mostly short sleeves, the assemblage at the Ritz-Carlton Sarasota’s posh Lido Key beach club was both happy testimonial and unapologetic promotional stunt.
In all, some two dozen elected officials and others filmed spots that will be cobbled into a YouTube video aimed at bolstering the area’s image.
“Our beaches are as beautiful as they’ve ever been,” said Richard Bradshaw, owner of the Comfort Inn and Days Inn hotels, on Clark Road, and chairman of Sarasota County’s Tourist Development Council.
“The water here is clear, clean and refreshing,” said Jim McManemon, the Ritz-Carlton’s general manager, to a background of beach strollers and pelicans fishing for a late breakfast.
But amid the pep rally atmosphere and the images of pure, green waters and foamy whitecaps, dark clouds formed and sounds of thunder rumbled off in the distance.
More symbolically, clouds may coalesce in the weeks ahead, as the gushing oil — estimated now to be as much as 3.8 million gallons daily by some scientists — meets summer hurricane season, beginning June 1.
Oil from the downed BP America rig Deepwater Horizon appears poised to move, flowing into the so-called “loop current” in the Gulf, according to satellite images. That shift could redirect the fuel toward the Florida Keys, though away from Southwest Florida and its barrier islands. The loop current is about 100 miles off this region’s coastline.
But if a major hurricane hits, oil could be picked up and redistributed hundreds of miles, to a place that could be devastating for the region’s tourist trade: Southwest Florida beaches.
“The loop current is pretty far offshore from Sarasota, so unless there’s wind and current that pushes it, I think it’s pretty good news for you guys,” said Stephen “Dr. Beach” Leatherman, chair professor and director of coastal research and director of the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University in Miami.
Leatherman remains confident enough that Southwest Florida will be spared, though, that he intends to include Siesta Public Beach in his 2010 Top 10 survey of the nation’s best beaches, due out May 28.
More than a few predict Siesta will garner the top spot this year. In 2009, it was ranked behind only Hanalei Bay Beach in Kauai, Hawaii.
“Siesta will be in the Top 10. It has not dropped out because I think there’s a low possibility of oil there,” Leatherman said. “If I thought there was a high probability — a high risk — I’d have to drop it out of the Top 10, but I don’t feel that way.”
Dr. Beach is not nearly as hopeful for at least one Panhandle beach, stripping it from contention in the 2010 list because of its proximity to the oil slick, now believed to be 10 miles long and three miles wide.
But Leatherman cautions that while the probability of oil reaching Southwest Florida is low, it still exists.
“You still have a threat,” he said. “As long as there is oil gushing out there, and as long as BP hasn’t capped it, it’s there.”
Leatherman said that a low-level hurricane — or even a tropical storm — that edges the Texas coast in September or October, when weather patterns are right, could generate winds that push oil to Southwest Florida shores.
Most hurricane patterns during summer, however, come up from the south, which decreases the possibility that winds would have the power or ability to drive oil here.
Officials at the National Hurricane Center expect that hurricane influence on the path of the oil slick will depend largely on the track of a storm.
“A hurricane passing to the west of the oil slick could drive a large volume of oil to the coast,” wrote Dennis Feltgen, a center spokesman and meteorologist, in an e-mail on Monday.
But some scientists believe Southwest Florida could easily receive some spill-related tar balls or other oil pollution.
“If one of the sub-surface plumes gets into the loop current, then you will see oil in Southwest Florida,” said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology with the Weather Underground and the related wunderground.com, a popular online weather site. “It would be likely, but it would be slower in getting there.”
Like Leatherman, Masters believes that overall the probability of oil in this region is low, thanks to Southwest Florida’s position relative to the loop current and seasonal wind directions.
Unless a major storm strikes.
“If there’s a hurricane, then all bets are off, because you’d get wild transportation of surface waters, and the upwell of water would be substantial,” Masters said. “It would mean a lot of oil in places that had not gotten any.”
He noted that a storm with 70 mph winds days after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska sent oil outward from the spill source, contaminating beaches and shoreline for 500 miles.
That potential, along with perceptions that oil is already here, are what have chamber officials, Realtors, politicians — even tennis legend Nick Bollettieri — worried.
“We need to make sure to send the message out that there’s never been a better time to come to Sarasota,” McManemon told the Lido Beach gathering, just before filming began.
Staff writer Kate Spinner contributed to this report.
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