‘This bill protects our precious waters’: How a Florida environmental group scored a win against Big Oil

The giant and catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, also known as the BP oil spill, didn’t reach Apalachicola Bay in 2010, but the threat of oil reaching this beautiful and environmentally valuable stretch of northern Florida ’s Gulf coast was still enough to devastate the region’s economy.

The Florida state congressman Jason Shoaf remembers how the threat affected the bay.

“It harmed our commercial fishing, aquaculture operations, and just the threat of oil kept tourists away for months,” Shoaf told The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Guardian . “Businesses were forced to close, jobs were lost, and the disaster reshaped our region forever.”

Those memories

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