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BP capturing oil from Gulf gusher, Obama slams firm

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-06-05 10:35
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BP capturing oil from Gulf gusher, Obama slams firm

A wall painted with protests messages against British Petroleum (BP) and US President Barack Obama is pictured as Obama's motorcade travels from New Orleans to Grand Isle, Louisiana, June 4, 2010. [Agencies]

Florida Braces

Networks continued to televise images of oil lapping into fragile marshlands and coating sea birds, mostly along the hard-hit Louisiana coast.

Oil sheen and tar balls washed up along a stretch shoreline crowded with beachgoers in northwest Florida in what appeared to be the spill's first impact on that state.

"You see shells and jellyfish and trash, but I've never seen oil here. It's crazy," said Anthony Cross, while walking along Pensacola Beach with his three daughters, holding a child's fishing net full of tar.

Florida, the so-called Sunshine State with a $60 billion-a-year tourism industry, has been bracing this week for the forecasted arrival of the spilled oil, which has already hit Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama shores to the west.

The BP CEO had to apologize after angering Gulf residents by saying last weekend that "I'd like my life back."

The region's frustration with the company and the government was apparent on Friday at a free hamburger and hot dog lunch for out-of-work fisherman at the city hall in Lafitte, Louisiana.

"It's all up in the air right now," said Jerry Perrin, who has harvested crabs and shrimp for 60 years in Louisiana's waters. "The government needs to start spending more money now."

Obama is confronting one of his biggest political tests as his party girds for tough congressional elections in November. He called off a trip to Australia and Indonesia set for this month to focus on the spill, amid criticism over his handling of the crisis.

Neither Obama nor BP fared well in a new CBS public opinion poll, which found an overwhelming majority of Americans believing that both the president and the firm should be doing more to clean up the spill.

But the disapproval ratings for both Obama and BP's spill response -- 44 percent disapproved of the US leader's handling of it versus 68 percent for BP -- were little changed from a similar poll last week.