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Ask Pensacola’s fretfully quiet seafront traders why the tourists have all stayed away and they angrily recall one chaotic day back in late June.
Then, hungry for dramatic TV footage to support Barack Obama’s announcement, that the BP - or, as he preferred, ‘British Petroleum’ - oil spill was ‘the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced’, news networks descended on their town.
They quickly found what they were looking for: shocking images of Pensacola’s famously white beaches thickly-coated with sticky, black crude oil and apparently beyond salvation.
The apocalyptic message was reinforced in doom-laden interviews with locals. ‘It’s damn near biblical. This place is done for!’ lamented 36-year-old Kevin Reed, whose family have swum and sunbathed in the area for generations.
His anguish was understandable.
Yet, as I saw this week, nothing could be further from the truth. Strolling along the beach for an hour, I found just one, pea-sized tar-ball which crumbled to nothing between my fingers.
When, as a young boy, I played on Morecambe beach in Lancashire, worse things often washed up from the nearby ICI refinery.
But as our team leader, 41-year-old scientist Stephane Grenon, told me as we skimmed across the shallows, using a craft able to reach the shore is the only sure way to tell whether oil is present.
This is because the wetland fringes in this region are always surrounded by a thick, dark-brown plant sediment known as ‘coffee ground’ for its resemblance to the dregs left at the bottom of the cup.
Even from a few feet away, this sediment can be very easily mistaken for oil, and often when passing boats or aircraft report spotting oil on the shore, this is what they have really seen.
This is one reason why the extent of the coastal oiling has been exaggerated. Indeed, Grenon, a veteran of 25 spills, says he is constantly amazed at how little pollution he finds.
He says: ‘I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s probably the largest spill there has ever been and yet there’s hardly any oil.
According to Dr Ed Owens, the veteran British oil spill expert who runs the SCAT teams, there are several reasons why the Gulf appears to have escaped so incredibly lightly.
First, the type of light oil that leaked here dissipates far more quickly than the medium crude that pumped from the Exxon Valdez, particularly in these warm waters.
Second, powerful currents from the enormous Mississippi Delta swept much of the oil away from the shore. In addition, there is the undeniable success of the clean-up effort, which is far more sophisticated and effective than those used to tackle previous disasters.
The combined result of these factors is clear from the statistics. Although more than 9,000 miles of shoreline lies within reach of the Deepwater Horizon rig, just 369 miles have been oiled - and only 53 of them with what are classed as ‘heavy’ deposits.
Compare this with the Exxon when, though the spill was 20 times smaller, the oil was so persistent and spread so widely that more than 2,000 miles of coastline were hit - and even today lumps of tar are occasionally found trapped between the rocks.
So, given all THAT, why in the world would our Government keep bleating that it's the "worst environmental disaster ever to hit America"?
So, in Barack Obama’s words, which of these two terrible spills was ‘the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced’?
Back in mid-June, with approval of his presidency at an all-time low in the opinion polls, and critics drawing parallels between his mishandling of the BP crisis and the Hurricane Katrina fiasco that forever tarnished George Bush’s reputation, the answer was obvious.
Not only was it important for him to be seen to recognise the worst-case scenario - and appear to be doing everything he could to avert it - but he needed to find a scapegoat.
Thus, he turned on BP - a nominally British company, though half of its top executives and the majority of its workers are Americans - with a vengeance.
While I'm thrilled for the Gulf Coast and it appears to have dodged a much larger problem, the Brits' view of Obama is striking in its truthfulness. The comments following this story are priceless...
Did it all just magically vanish? Small minded sentiment.