BP, like its oil in the Gulf, is disappearing in Tallahassee

This past weekend I drove up to Tallahassee to drive one of my daughters back home for a two week mini-summer vacation. She'd spent summer school up at FSU so she could stay on track to graduate next spring.

As we were driving around Tallahassee, I kept noticing that every BP station we passed was closed. This one to the right, at the corner of West Pensacola and South Ocala, had a Chevron across from it on the opposite corner doing lots of business. While I certainly didn't drive all over Tallahassee to see if there were any open BP's, I saw enough that were out of business to wonder if they were all out of business (the other three I saw were on the corner of West Tennessee and North Monroe, North Monroe and Torreya, and Thomasville Road an Glenview).

Are all these BP stations (and perhaps others in the area) closed because of a boycott against BP in the Tallahassee area? Is BP short on money already because of the billions currently paid, and even more billions to be paid out in the future? Or is it just cagey politics on BP's half, in that it's not a good idea to keep telegraphing your continued presence to the seat of state government?

Things that make you go "hmmmm".

On that note, here are a list of environmental stories I've collected since my first list.

• Depths of the disaster - A nice, graphical piece put together by CNN. Interesting statistics, the most frightening is the total amount of oil that spewed into the Gulf: 4,900,000 barrels.
• New Questions Arise On Dispersant Use In Oil Spill - It isn't enough that the oil is toxic in its own right. But now we get to worry about the "liberal use of chemical dispersants whose threat to sea life remains unknown." Isn't that lovely.
  
• Many in Gulf are outraged at reports of vanishing oil - Out of sight, out of mind they like to say. By July 30, when this story was published, many were saying that the oil was pretty much gone. And it may have looked that way if you were flying up high over the Gulf. But down at the surface, too many were seeing as much if not more oil than they'd seen before the gusher was capped. I even heard stories that some were questioning if the disaster was overblown. If you believe that, go back to the first link in this list and consider that at nearly 5 billion barrels of oil, the BP blowout is now the largest single oil disaster in US history.
  

I could keep going, but it gets depressing.

Equipment Used

Olympus E-P2 with M.Zuiko 17mm