Gulf Coast residents smelled a calamity Friday as the oil slick caused by the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion floated toward Louisiana.
The Coast Guard was conducting a flyover Friday morning to see if oil had reached the state's coastline as federal, state and local officials scrambled to avert a natural disaster threatening to surpass the Exxon Valdez disaster 20 years ago.
People along the Louisiana coast caught a whiff of the wafting smell of oil and feared an environmental nightmare of greater scope than when the Valdez tanker ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 and spilled 11 million gallons of oil.
"There's certainly immense potential consequences," said LuAnn White, director of the Tulane Center for Applied Environmental Public Health.
"This is a disaster," said Dean Blanchard, who runs a wholesale seafood business in the region. "We definitely need some help."
